For christ’s sake are people blind? Every dime Bush throws your way is getting eaten up at the pump.
And now for the neocon rebuttal:
A. OPEC isn’t gouging us in retaliation to Bush pissing on the Middle East like it’s his personal stomping ground. It’s because they are greedy, vicious bastards and should be ground into the dirt like the vermin they are. Besides I for one am sick and tired of them thinking they own that oil just because they happen to be situated on top of it.
B. $300 is A LOT of money. You can feed a family of five for months on that kind of scratch… provided you really, really like Top Ramen.
C. Bush is a visionary. Whatever pain we are experiencing now is going to all be worth it when we look back years from now the Middle East is a bastion of democracy and freedom, and it’s all thanks to Bush beating some discipline into those miserable fucks.
Ahhh… Nothing satisfies like a rash political flame in the morning
That’s just my point! The super terrific War on Terror being waged in the Middle East has so nothing to do with Middle East oil prices. And even if it did people aren’t spending their sweet government checks (courtesy our generous and beloved Bush) on gas anyway. They are using the money trickling down to them from the people who got $30,000 off their taxes.
Ah, so who gets credit for the economic recovery, even though weve had a major terror attack on this soil and were in the middle of a war?
Hmmmm, That $300 (for your gas) would have had to come from somewhere.
Be glad you got it and you didn`t have to fight with the kids for the last morsel of food.
Or, would you rather pay $300 MORE in taxes every year? There would be people dropping like flies all over the place from starvation.
I’m kind of wondering how we’re going to be paying off our huge deficit, right now. We’re probably going to have to pay $300 more a year in taxes (some time in the future) to take care of this problem.
Unless there starts to be some jobs created, it’s a useless recovery, whoever gets credit for it. The people with jobs can get through even hard economic times a fuck of a lot better than the unemployed.
Lilshieste, Arguably, our deficit is still manageable at this point. People are buying govnt bonds, interest rates are very low, inflation is in check. The best way to get out of deficit is to cut govnt spending. If you just raise taxes to get out from under it the money will be spent on more gov`nt programs instead of being applied to the deficit.
Revtim, Still, you must ask yourself;
Self, “Would I rather have less jobs and a shitty economy? or less jobs and a growing, recovering economy?” I think self knows the answer. No such thing as a useless recovery.
I also think that the job growth is disturbing but that we`re just on the verge of a healthy increase.
What that chart shows me is that jobs have grown since pre-Bush (I know, jobs have been growing since the beginning of time). We had a falloff of jobs after 2001 but that there is currently a trend of growth. Good.
The labor force, then, is not a fixed number of people. It increases with the long-term growth of the population, it responds to economic forces and social trends, and its size changes with the seasons. On average in 2000, there were roughly 135 million employed and 6 million unemployed making up a labor force of 141 million persons. There were about 69 million persons not in the labor force.
Also, check out this chart.
According to The Dept of Labor there ARE 138 million civilian jobs now and unemployment is at 5.6%.
Follow the patterns. Note that 5.6% is historically acceptable.
Everybodys harping that the numbers dont match the Bush Admins predictions, when in reallity things aren`t as bad as people make them out to be.
Also note that there are about 8 million people unemployed right now. The lowest we`ve had in modern times is about 5.6 million.
That leaves us with about 2.4 million less jobs.
Given that there are about 19,355 incorporated cities in the US, that breaks down to 124 people per city.
For one thing, there are several thousand Federal employees who have worked less than 80 hours of overtime since the tax break went into effect. The agency I’m in isn’t funded by taxes to it’s like Congress has free money.
Unless Dubya has his way, we’ll be paying $300 more a year effective 2012. That’s when the tax break is set to expire but he wants to make it permanent.
Gas isn’t that expensive. In inflation-adjusted dollars, 1981 was the highest-priced gas year. We should probably be paying more. It’d be good to bring us in line with what it costs in the rest of the world. Maybe we’d stop driving these giant trucks all over the place and suffer with regular-sized cars.
Americans regard cheap gasoline as their birthright, and I think it’s time that ended.
When I bitched about the recession in the early '80s, my grandparents told me that it was far worse in the '30s and that this ('80s recession) is nothing. I am here to tell you that this “recession” is nothing because it was worse (but not far worse) in the early '80s…quit your bitchen.
Hell, the price of oil isn’t up because of OPEC, it’s up because of futures speculators driving the price per barrel of light-sweet crude (isn’t that just an oxymoron?) up to $39.96. Hell, even cutting 4% starting today leaves Saudi Arabia at 89% of its normal capacity. We can’t drive prices down by increasing supply, there isn’t enough unused capacity to put a whole shitload on the market. You want to get oil prices down? Get interest rates back up and money back into the stock market. (Heard it on NPR.)