Tag: Economy
Stock Market Rallies After SOTU
12,000.65
Level of the Dow Jones Industrial Average the morning after Pres. Obama’s State of the Union address. This mark is the highest for the Dow since June, 2008.
The Fire Next Time: Can We Build a Recession-Proof Economy?
As we climb out of the recession, which we clearly are and were before the freshmen Republicans in the House took their oaths of office last week, it’s a good time to remember we are not all on the same page about how we got into an economic mess, nor about how to go forward from it.
There are people out there who believe, thanks to FOX News and Rush Limbaugh, that the whole housing market collapse was because of groups like ACORN trying to help people who couldn’t afford them buy houses.
Keefe: ‘We can either summon the collective will to invest in our common future or continue to stumble along hoping the next asset bubble temporarily bails us out while entering into a period of long national decline’
There are others, like me, who witnessed the mortgage crisis from closer to the inside and know firsthand that the wealthy led the way into economic ruin with such instruments as no-money-down mortgages, interest-only mortgages, five-year balloons, and other highly creative arrangements dreamed up for folks who wanted to make even more profit by flipping second and third and fourth houses than they were by investing in shaky stocks.
Most of those in the latter group were just one slow-selling property away from bankruptcy and foreclosure, which we all got to find out together. Of course, most of them will just wait out the seven or so years it takes to clear one’s credit record if one is of a certain income bracket, and go forth to sin again.
And since we’ve never collectively gotten straight about the causes, why should we expect to agree on the remedies? Sadly, we shouldn’t.
Joseph F. Keefe, president and CEO of Pax World Mutual Funds, says we can’t fix what’s wrong in this country, or in the world, by looking for the next boom. (Emphasis that follows is added.)
Unemployment Continues to Fall — Ahead of House Republican Majority
420,000
Number of new unemployment claims submitted last week, making it two weeks in a row that new claims dropped. The figure needs to get to about 400,000 to declare a recovery but at its height during the past year, 500,000 claims were the norm. The incoming Republicans in the House will no doubt claim credit for the recovery already in progress.
Verbatim
I was in business for 35 years and nothing happened until somebody bought something. I never based my production decisions on the amount of taxes but did base my decisions upon the likelihood of sales.
— Charley B., a Pensito Review commenter, responding to Republican claims that tax cuts produce jobs, stimulating the economy. Charley, and most of us, prefer the more direct route, which begins with consumer spending. He also notes that if the Bush tax cuts were intended to produce jobs, judging by American unemployment numbers, they were a failure. We admit, though, that the tax cuts did create plenty of jobs in other countries (while the rich back here pocketed their tax savings).
Verbatim
…one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming. Elite opinion has been slow to recognize this reality…Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman…asked for “a fiscal program that combines near-term measures to enhance growth with strong, confidence-inducing steps to reduce longer-term structural deficits.” My immediate thought was, why not ask for a pony, too?
— Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winning economist and New York Times columnist
Record $1.659 Trillion Corporate Profit Under Obama’s Socialist Jackboot Undercuts GOP Spin on Govt Economic Policies
U.S. corporations have reported the highest profits recorded since the Commerce Department began tracking corporate income growth 60 years ago: $1.659 Trillion. That renders as $1,659,000,000,000 in numerical values.
Granted, while the profits represent the highest dollar amount ever recorded, Matthew Iglesias at the liberal site Think Progress says that, based on the Commerce Dept. report (see charts at right), “record-breaking” is a relative term because the figure itself has not been adjusted for inflation.
The New York Times financial pages, which generally side with Republicans on economic issues, took a rosier view:
That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms…. Corporate profits have been doing extremely well for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history. As a share of gross domestic product, corporate profits also have been increasing, and they now represent 11.2 percent of total output. That is the highest share since the fourth quarter of 2006, when they accounted for 11.7 percent of output.
GOP Tax Plan Costs $36.6 Bil More Than Dems’ – Swing Voters, You’ve Been Had
Here’s more proof that this “new” crop of Republican leaders in Washington — Boehner, Cantor, McConnell, DeMint and the rest — are the same Bush rubberstampers whose stealthy war on the middle class in the 2000s transferred more of the nation’s wealth up from the nation’s entrepreneurial class to the GOP’s corporate sponsors and their friends, the idle rich, and whose policies caused the economy to crash in September 2008, barely a month before they were turned out of Congress by the voters.
Households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011.
This year they managed to fool swing voters into believing they have changed — that they are against deficits, against spending, against big government — but as this chart clearly shows, their hidden agenda has not changed:
A Republican plan to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit next year — and transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation’s millionaires, according to a congressional analysis released Wednesday.
New data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011, for an average tax cut per household of about $100,000.
Here’s a chart so simple that even a tea bagger can understand it, followed by an explainer segment on the chart from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show:
After Bellowing ‘Where Are the Jobs?’ for Weeks, Now Boehner Can’t Say When He’ll Create Jobs, How Many
Swing voters in the South and the Heartland who gave Republicans their majority in the House on Tuesday have gotten a rude awakening in the 48 hours or so since results were announced.
These voters elected the Republican candidates in their districts based on the candidates’ promises to make fiscal responsibility and job creation their top priorities.
But the swing voters should have been listening more carefully to the men back in Washington who will be their local reps’ leaders.
For example, in the final days before the vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear in his campaign stump speeches that the Republicans’ real objective had nothing whatsoever to do with the economy:
