I was employed during the entirety of the Clinton administration. I became unemployed six months into the Bush regime. I am still unemployed and have no prospects of employment. Damn that sneaky Bill Clinton for leading me on the way he did and then leaving the dirty work up to GWB. I suppose that when GWB gets tired of starting unneccesary wars and what not, he will pay attention to his domestic policies and see to it that I find a job again.
With a half trillion dollar trade deficit, I would find it hard to believe overall earnings are increasing regardless of actual employment figures. It’s a simple indicator that US dollars, and a good number of jobs, are flowing overseas.
Politicians know that hooting and hollering about creating jobs generates excitement, but getting production and the associated wealth back inside the borders is bit more complex than these easy to digest sound bites.
First, unemployment’s down, salary and jobs are up. This is all good.
But here’s the real thing: Did anybody, liberal or conservative, really think that you can’t force signs of a short-term recovery with a massive tax cut and increased government spending? I don’t think so. The problem is that you’re sacrificing the next 20 years to pay off the debts incurred by making this year artificially look a bit better.
-lv
Get a fucking clue, people: EVEN THE GOVERNMENT WOULDN’T BE SO STUPID AS TO STOP COUNTING PEOPLE AS UNEMPLOYED JUST BECAUSE THEIR BENEFITS RUN OUT.
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics Frequently Asked Questions: (Unfortunately, they aren’t asked frequently enough, especially by people like the OP who don’t take five fucking minutes to figure out what they’re talking about before they open a Pit thread.)
Unless I missed the giant whoosing sound and/or the implied smilies at 3:45 AM, it ain’t GWB’s responsibility to find you employment, it’s your’s, Bub.
I just moved 700 miles to take a job this past week, after 6 months of unemployment. From where I sit, things are looking up.
Congratulations, vunderbob, on your new job and on your move. I hope that your new locations provides you with many opportunities to make new friends, broaden your horizons, etc,. etc. I would be perfectly willing to move 700 miles to accept employment but I can’t find anyone, near or far, who is willing to hire a 63 year old man and pay him a living wage. I am working on a deal to do some consulting for a company in China, which is considerably further from home than 700 miles. That is the only prospect on a rather bleak horizon, and it is far from definite.
You are correct that it is not GWB’s personal responsibility to find me a job and I doubt anyone thought that I expected him to do so. My point is, and was, that Bush or his evil minions/masters are beating a drum which evokes no resonance with me or the bunches of people who will remain in our present circumstances.
May I ask what you do? The last downturn seemed to hit technical folk more than usual, IMAO. I judged the length of the recession by an increase in the want ads for engineers and techs, which coincidentally, boomed right after the tax cut took effect.
At 63, is retirement an option?
Why don’t you explain it to us? Or are you just pulling shit out of your ass again?
jklann - Thank you for providing the BLS cite.
Zoe, laigle - Wow…that must be embarassing
LouisB - You can’t really blame Bush. Instead of managing the dot-com bubble, Clinton basically let irrational exuberance drive the economy nd took the credit while Bush had the misfortune of having Enron, 9/11 and the expected bursting of the bubble all happen right about the same time. Maybe there was some stuff that Bush could have handled things better but it is a fact of life that the economy is cyclical. The higher it flies, the harder it is going to crash.
Not shady at all. It all depends what’s important to you. To the movie maker, the bottom line is how much revenue a film can generate. It doesn’t matter if its 100 million people paying $1 or 100 people paying $1M dollars. Figuring out the artistic relevance or popularity of a movie is a lot more subjective and is something that history will decide.
Increasing GDP and decreasing unemployment are good things. Let’s hope that they continue.
Of course, the only economy that is important to me is mine.
OK. So we have, what, 6% unemployment?
I would like to see a breakdown on that, including the percentage of people who made their pile and don’t have to work, the people who think that working three bitch jobs to pay the bills is beneath them so they don’t work, and the people who prefer not to work because it’s easier to leech off of mommy and daddy.
Unemployment statistics, for that very reason, are absurd. Either you work or you don’t, and if you don’t for whatever reason, that’s a check in the unemployed box. So the statistics are skewed from the outset. It’s also foolish to assume that unemployment will ever hit zero, for the reasons stated above.
All in all, 6% isn’t bad. It could be much worse. Ask France and Germany.
Well, I was gonna, but Airman Doors just covered all the bases I was gonna write about, so you can go pester him with your talk-radio analysis.
I make no claims to the content of Doors’ bowels, however. 
vunderob, the bulk of my experience has been as an engineer in the frequency control industry. At the moment, that industry is badly depressed, with most of the manufacturing capability in the USA having been ceded first to the Japanese, then to Korea, and now to China. It is hard to fault the users of our product—what costs us a dollar to make, can be purchased from China for a quarter. Most of the companies still working in the USA have very limited production capability, prefering to buy product for resale from various far east manufacturers. As to retirement, I am drawing some retirement money but I sure as hell don’t want to be—and I do work part-time to supplement it.
msmith537, I can blame Bush if I want to. He might have been confronted with a downturn, but I would expect an MBA to have some idea of how to handle it, and I don’t believe massive deficit spending is a good idea.
I realize that no president has that great an effect on the economy, except for the general caution that prevails when a specific president isn’t trusted by the general population. I blame Bush for embroiling us in an unneccessary war and for siphoning billions of dollars out of our economy, to be spent rebuilding a country that didn’t need rebuilding until we, at the behest of GWB, bombed it into oblivion. As to Clinton, how was he supposed to put a damper on a runaway economy? If Bush can’t manage the economy, why should Clinton have done any better? I don’t recall Clinton advising people to invest in the dotcom bubble—those that did invest accepted the risk.
I know people, not saying you are one of them, who wouldn’t give Clinton credit if he had managed to acheive world peace, eliminate hunger and povery on a world-wide basis, and single handedly found a cure for aids. From my point of view, I was never, repeat never unemployed from the age of twenty-one on. I never drew an unemployment check until I was sixty-one, and I didn’t expect to ever have to do so.
So, a little kvetching with the usual sophomoric “Get a job!” post thrown in for good measure. A quote from Ben Bernanke, Fed governor, about why things are not going to get much better any time soon:
From: http://www.2000wave.com/article.asp?id=mwo110803
Points 2 and 3 are particularly telling.
All I can say is, if you’re unemployed, good luck. I’m fervently hoping not to join you any time soon.
Who said “Get a job!”?
But, now that you mention it, give me one very good compelling reason why people can’t get jobs. I see the newspapers full up with want ads, there are job finding services all over the Internet, there are temp services where the only job requirement is a pulse and some occasional respiration, and if push comes to shove, you could do what I used to do (and may have to do again) and work three or four different jobs to make the required money.
Other than some sort of physical disability, I can’t think of a single reason why people could not be working. So what if it’s not a job you like. A lot of people hate their jobs. Take me, for instance. I now have the ability to run, from production to broadcast, any commercial radio or television station. If I don’t get hired, well, them’s the breaks. It’s back to mopping floors and slinging food for me. Sucks, sure, but my family is more important than my ego. I’ll tough out the bitch jobs, even though I am vastly “overqualified” for the jobs, because they pay the bills.
So, pantom, tell me why you consider that “sophmoric” to say that people should get jobs, any jobs, instead of complaining about how they can’t get the one they want and then blaming their failure on Bush, Congress, the poor economy, the rotten, greedy corporations, or the sluggish stock market. Everyone in the world is dealing with this. There is nothing special about me, you, or Joe Schmuckatelly down the street.
As would I. (take any old job in a bad spot. Didn’t do that with women though. Oh well.) I would also agree that blaming Bush is kind of not real productive, as this little downturn was definitely baked in the cake when he took office. OTOH, it’s been long enough that a judgement that his policies aren’t the best way to produce jobs is reasonably accurate, IMO. He does have the worst record as far as jobs of any President since Hoover, and I know of no good excuse for that. Reagan took over just as a recession was getting started, and it was obvious at that time that that recession was partially a result of a bit of overstimulus applied during the election year to goose the economy. This is roughly analogous to what Bush faced coming in, but far worse: before that recession ended, the unemployment rate was the worst it had been since the Depression. At this point in Reagan’s first term, however, jobs were being created at a very rapid clip, that had been going on for a good nine months, and despite having to face this extraordinarily rough patch, he’d actually managed to create a few jobs, net, by this time.
As for Clinton, he faced the largest deficits in history when he took office. As I recall, he did solve that problem.
So Bush is hardly the first President to have to deal with tough times. In my memory, he is one of the more inept at handling it, though.
Getting back to the main point, when times are a bit tough, having a little sympathy for the out of work should come easy. The apparent lack of this is what I’m faulting you for. It is indeed sophomoric not to be able to display a little of this.
I have plenty of sympathy for the out of work. It sucks that they lost their old jobs. In some instances, that is a gigantic blow financially.
That sympathy, however, is tempered by the knowledge that there are a gazillion things that they could be doing, but it doesn’t meet their standards of living, or pay the same as their old jobs, when a reduction in that standard will get them through the hard times with hopefully a minimum of discomfort and dislocation.
That earns a big “Waaaaah” from me. I’m admittedly biased by my own personal experiences, I know nothing other than crappy jobs, and it peeves me when people reject the same jobs I would die for because they’re not good enough for them.
Airman, do you feel that these crappy jobs make good use of you as a person? Do you think that society is getting the full benefit of your intelligence, creativity and drive when you are, say, washing dishes and scrubbing floors? I’ve done both in my life, and while I agree you do what you have to in order to survive, I never really glamorized it the way you seem to. I always felt that not only was I losing out by working a crappy job, the U.S. was losing out (granted to a much lesser extent) by not taking full advantage of my abilities.
I’ve gone on to better jobs since, regressing to worse jobs on occasion, but I never felt that anything GOOD was going on when circumstances forced me to take a crappy job, for me or the society I live in.
Airman, you’re chanelling Ronald Reagan. Exact same stuff he used to say (minus the internet thing).
I’m hardly glamorizing the situation. Saying it “sucks” and calling them “bitch” jobs kinda takes all of the glamour out of it, I would think. I’m simply stating that you can look for other jobs that “take full advantage of your capabilities” while you’re working the crappy jobs that are temporarily paying the bills. The alternative is to collect unemployment, which is a net drain on society and serves to exacerbate the situation by taking money better used elsewhere to assist in the recovery.
Petulantly saying that you’re not going to work because it’s “beneath you”, IMHO, is uncool. Everybody knows that guy on unemployment who milks it as long as he can because he can’t find the killer job that pays what he thinks he deserves. Well, that guy is collecting your tax dollars and providing no services at all. Do you think that’s cool? I sure don’t.
Airman Doors, USAF, unless you are referring to taxes paid by employers then you are mistaken as to the source of unemployment funds. Unemployment insurance is funded by taxes paid by employers, not by employees. One might argue that that money should be kept by the employer for disbursement to employees, but I doubt that would ever happen.
As to the first paragraph: Our President has touted the new jobs as proff of an economy in recovery. He does not mention that new jobs pay so much less than the jobs lost, even though he MUST know this. IMO, this is dishonest. Granted, some jobs are better than no jobs. But the buying power from the new jobs compared with old is sadly lacking.
As to your second paragraph, I do not know such a person. I DO know that unemplyment would not cover my monthly expenses, so that would not be a viable option. Right now, unemployment would cover my rent and my car payment. Food, electricity, heat, phone, insurance on the vehicle and my modest credit card debt would not be paid for.
I suppose I could sell my modest vehicle for something seemingly cheaper. But experience has taught me that a new vehicle is often cheaper than a used vehicle, when the cost of upkeep and repair are added in. Plus the dependability factor. Plus the fact that in L.A., there is not much public transportaion, and what there is ain’t working at all 'cause the MTA workers are out on strike.
I agree with you that we must do whatever we need to do to survive. Bad breaks do not mean that one has to give up. I, personally, look on the public dole as a measure of last resort and hope I never have to use it.
But my point is only that the ecoomy is not good. The employment situation is awful, despite what we hear about “new” jobs. If I were to lose my job, things would indeed be bleak.