Tag: GDP

The economy sucks so bad they have to add Seinfeld to the calculations.

No joke!

For the first time in four years, the Commerce Department will revise its estimates of U.S. gross domestic product — the value of U.S.-made goods and services — back to 1929. The biggest of the changes affect money spent on research and development and on artistic endeavors such as writing books or filming TV shows.

For the first time, R&D spending and money spent on the arts will count in GDP — if they’re intended to generate long-term streams of income, such as a decade or more of drug sales or profits from syndicated reruns of a hit TV show.

That led the government to decide that spending on TV comedies and dramas — such as Seinfeld — will count, but game shows and reality shows, such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians, will not, because they have a limited syndication market.

Fewer young adults are working full time. Politicians are arguing about whether it’s better to have millions employed at starvation wages or risk making them unemployed by giving them a living wage. Official unemployment might be down, but employment is not up. Toyota is giving logistics help to charity rather than actual money (clearly they needed it but still). And government safety nets — that RepubliCANTs want to cut, are the only thing keeping millions of people out of poverty.

Oh well, at least we don’t have to add the Kardashians to GDP.

In Closing: silly women clearly don’t know what men think is good for them; turns out that when you treat kids like criminals, they live up to your standards; anyone surprised?; and the Burka Avenger.

Irrelevant?

Parts of the following are anonymized for what should be obvious reasons.

After class recently, I overheard a classmate loudly complaining that this particular class was “a waste of money” on material that “I’ll never use in [career].” I had other places to be, and better things to do than set this young person straight.

First, the class in question is a prerequisite to the degree program. You can’t even apply for the program until this class is completed with a decent grade — and by the way, many people fail this class. So even if the information does turn out to be “useless,” it has to be learned and learned well.

Second, the follow-on class — also a prerequisite — builds on this material and is extremely relevant to the career path in question. If you don’t understand the first class, there is no point in attempting to take the second class. I hope never to encounter someone in that career that didn’t understand the material in the follow-on class.

And finally, if my dear classmate would pay attention, it would become clear that the only irrelevant thing in the class is the attitude. At least this person does not pose serious competition for the seats in the program.

I had noticed that some of my class materials make an effort to relate classroom material to the real world. Nice, but I would have thought that some things are obvious. Clearly not. It turns out that many young people just can’t see the relationship between “what I am doing now” and “what I want to be doing a decade from now.”

This was reinforced by a pair of items I came across. Apparently there are people who think even the English language is irrelevant, despite the fact that any decent job will require reading and writing at a level far above what  I am seeing in the classroom.

In Closing: inequality; weight loss; personal finance; if it isn’t safe and educational, it doesn’t belong in a school; pay attention to the bottom chart; quack; megacommute; and astronaut wisdom.

Oh Nuts, It’s Her Annual Feminism Post

If you don’t read Natalie Dee, you should:

She’s married to Drew of “Toothpaste for Dinner” and “Married to the Sea.” You should go check it out and maybe order some T-Shirts.

Anyways….

I’m trying to link to more news than other people’s opinions. No point in being part of the echo chamber. Nevertheless, PunditMom is right to point out that the “SuperCongress” (it’s a bird! it’s a plane! it‘s Unconstitutional!!) has some fundamental problems with it’s makeup. Namely,  nobody’s wearing any. Not even the token female member, Senator Patty Murray — for whom I once voted. One token woman, one token black man, one token Hispanic, no Asians, nobody controversial. So 9 white guys and 3 other. And these people are supposed to decide that we can make do without by Thanksgiving. Worse yet, nobody seems to be able to stop them.

Other bloggers have done a great job talking about Christian Dominionism, an offshoot of Christian thinking that would have horrified both Jesus and George Washington. And while it may seem like a tangent to bring it up, hair pat-downs and other TSA intrusions are quite a nice way of telling the sheep — particularly brown and/or women sheep — to shut up and obey daddy/husband/authority.

And before anyone says that profiling is the only answer because only scary brown people are terraists, don’t make me slap your worthless ass with Tim McVeigh and William Krar! The Unabomber was a white man planting bombs before the War on Terror, too. If you think only Muslims are terrorists, you are too ignorant to participate in this discussion. Kindly close this tab and go away.

I am a woman. I don’t need a man’s permission to live my life, do my job, or much of anything else. If that offends you, I sure hope somebody invents a time machine so you can go back to the 50s and enjoy an era when each of us knew his or her place.

In Closing: math lesson; download this coffee; SF/F; won’t somebody please think about thinking of the children?; You tell’em, Professor!; Taibbi nails it again; sex offenders; the Costs of War; and seriously, go check out Drew and Natalie.

Just a few items on the economy

So let’s just start with Robert Reich, pointing out the disconnect between Washington and the economy.

The economy, by the way, is in lousy shape. It’s just that between inflation reporting that automatically inflate GDP and corporations raking in record profits, it’s easy to pretend that things like anemic jobs numbers, people leaving the workforce, dropping housing prices, declining wages, high fuel prices, and all the other things that effect those of us in the trenches don’t matter.

But here’s an odd glimmer of hope. One Fed official thinks it’s time to start raising interest rates. His reasoning is that it will encourage saving. Traditionalists should be ripping their hair out yelling about how it will kill the “recovery” (you know, the one we aren’t really having) by making it harder for businesses to borrow money (you know, the money banks aren’t really lending).

Some of those traditionalists might stop for a moment to consider that it would also stifle inflation (the inflation the feds have been trying to pretend hasn’t existed since the Clinton Administration). None of them will point out that it will make it more attractive for everyone to own bits of the national debt (the debt that Congress is arguing about). It is too much to hope that anyone other than myself is beginning to question whether super-low interest rates actually do much for the economy.

 

In Closing: porn; abortion; blast from the past; War on Drugs; humiliation; security; and cats.

Stop Lying about the Economy


Judge Judy had a little saying which I’m sure wasn’t original: “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” Well, by my way of thinking, The Experts who compile and release data have been peeing on our heads and telling us what a good thing golden rain is!

When Wal-Mart’s CEO says their shoppers are running out of money, things are bad. Seriously. Wal-Mart, for pity sake.

Unemployment is a serious problem. In fact, there’s one job for every 4 unemployed job seekers. That means that even if by some miracle we were able to fill every job vacancy with someone currently unemployed, we still couldn’t get unemployment down below 7%. And more people file for unemployment every week. Nevertheless, instead of doing anything that might create desperately needed jobs, Congress is hell-bent on slashing the deficit created by the Bush tax cuts. Never mind that creating jobs would be creating employees who earn an income and pay income tax.

Over a quarter of renters are paying more than half their income on housing — a number that should alarm anyone with a passing familiarity with the rental industry. This is despite the fact that “multi-generational housing” — double-speak for “I had to move in with the kids/parents” — is “hot.”

So now GDP growth has “slowed.” I still contend that if inflation were calculated fairly, we wouldn’t have had much in the way of “growth” in a decade. How can we have “growth” when so many people are jobless, underemployed, not even looking for work anymore, losing their homes, losing their savings, losing their retirement plans, not even having enough money to shop at Wal-Mart anymore? I bet it has a lot to do with companies like Exxon, Pepsi, and Microsoft having great earnings. These are large, multi-national businesses that earn money — and have workers — in many countries. Offshoring jobs is only part of the story. Remember, earnings season is just starting, so expect a lot more of these happy-Wall-Street stories.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the trade deficit. Granted, that’s already figured into GDP, so you can’t blame it for manipulating GDP, only causing a decline. That $45 thousand million dollars represents money that used to be in America, that is now in other nations, raising their standard of living. In one month! And do not forget that this number is as high as it is because here in America, we no longer make many things more durable than a latte.

So sure, the economy is great if you are a large corporation, or wealthy. To the rest of us, that golden rain is just someone else’s pee.

In closing: taking personal responsibility to it’s illogical extreme; better apply for that passport now; amen, CSM; on nutrition; Ezra comes >< this close to blaming the media for the Birthers; how come if ObamaCare is so bad, Republicans want to dismantle Medicare in favor of something just like it?; being poor is hazardous to your lifespan; you never know when you might spot something new; let me save you some time; more on student loans; and yeah, that will help.

Follow-Up and Vegas Miscellany

In a way I wish I had waited until today to write The BAMTOR Principle. By some weird coincidence a bunch of other people have also noticed that Banks Always Make Their Own Rules that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the law. It turns out that many people knew that Wall Street was selling mortgage backed securities that were destined to fail. But what HuffPo didn’t bother to point out is that what those banks and brokerages did was in violation of the law. This blatant double standard — “laws are for little people” — will continue until the Feds start putting people in jail, levying huge fines against individuals who signed off on breaking the law, and states sue for the right to prosecute violations of state law.

In light of this, the banksters have the chutzvah to say that breaking up “too big to fail” institutions would create more risk. Yeah, more risk for their jobs.

As far as the economy goes, it turns out that 74% of Americans agree with me that regardless of what the government says about GDP, we are still in a recession. It’s getting more obvious that the numbers are being gamed. But don’t expect any administration in the near future to start talking about what inflation, unemployment, and GDP really are, because then we would all understand what deep doo-doo we are standing in and probably vote a lot of bums out.

Of course you need to be careful about voting bums out, as Christine O’Donnell and Nevada’s own Sharron Angle illustrate. Congruent Angle? Sorry I’m running out of Angle jokes.

And that brings me to an armload of local interest items. Let’s start with the spectacular view from the Cosmopolitan. Down the Strip a little bit, be careful about sitting by the pool at CityCenter’s Vdara, or you may experience their unique “death ray.” If you are planning on getting off the Strip, you will want to at least look over these amusing tips. One of the restaurants I visit regularly has been reviewed again, and I only recognize two of the things they were served. I haven’t talked a lot about it, but I am keeping an eye on the case of Erik Scott, killed in broad daylight by Metro in front of a Costco in one of our most yuppified neighborhoods. By the way, last week’s CSI did a great job of addressing it and not addressing it.

In Closing: electromagnetic spectrum; lies your teachers told you; cheap food costs dear; abortion does not have dire emotional consequences; Israel cannot have its cake and eat it too; people don’t like health insurance reform because it didn’t go far enough!; True Mud; a few words on taxes; Professor DeLong nails the Republican view of America; have we tried the simple stuff first?; Jack LaLanne is 96 (was I the only one who noticed Drew Carey’s homage in the blue “speed suit”?); and medical ignorance.

On One Hand We Have GDP; On the Other We Have Reality

Steve Sack

Last month we were told that “Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 1.6 percent in the second quarter of 2010, (that is, from the first quarter to the second quarter), according to the “second” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter, real GDP increased 3.7 percent.” Sure it did. The government says so and they would surely never tell us something that wasn’t true!!

Meanwhile, in Realityland, the FDIC took over 6 banks Friday afternoon. Canadian news sources are writing about the decline and coming fall of the United States as a “superpower.” This week we learned that the poverty rate rose to a 15 year high, with a 51 year high in the number of people actually living in poverty, 3,800,000 more than last year, including just under 1 in every 5 children who contrary to what some people think have no control over their circumstances.  Despite the passage of a new health insurance reform bill, the number of people with health insurance dropped for the first time ever. The net worth of Americans has dropped roughly $12,300,000,000,000 since 2007. The small businesses that are vital to creating jobs both now and in future decades can’t get loans, and the new law that was supposed to “help small businesses” will likely do nothing of the sort. Big businesses are hoarding cash. Some people are calling it a “lost decade.”

Meanwhile millionaires are whining about the very idea that they might have to pay more taxes (when they aren’t screaming about the federal budget deficit) and admitting that they have had illegal immigrants working in their homes (rather than hire an unemployed American).

And the experts wonder why more Americans think a “third party” might be just the thing we need.

Next time, unless I am otherwise distracted, The BAMTOR Principle.

In Closing: let’s hear it for Elizabeth Warren!; “that guy who agrees with me is an expert, that other guy who doesn’t is a quack”; Senator Reid mad at Republicans blocking food safety reforms; “Sorry soldier, you’re too fat for this exercise program”; new rules to make it harder for banks to hide debt (like that will stop them).

Nice of him to notice, and Economic Bonus Round

I am glad to see someone with a high profile speaking out on this, and I sincerely hope other journalists start talking about it.

Now, about that economy.

The nicest thing I can say about the United States economy right now is that unemployment isn’t as bad as it is in much of Europe. Our economy lost jobs last month — and only partly because some of those temporary Census workers were let go — but the really awful part is that the number of workers went down. It isn’t that we had an abnormal number of people die or retire or anything like that, it’s just that over a half million people gave up on trying to find work. And that’s why the official unemployment rate went down.

Of course, if you just happen to have the right set of highly technical job skills, there are plenty of jobs. But — as Jill so ably points out — somehow or another businesses don’t think they should actually have to train employees to use very specialized equipment. I guess they are waiting for the “Qualified Employee Fairy” to stuff resumes under the door.

It’s also worth pointing out that the SBA is running out of money again, which means it will be even harder for small businesses to get money to ramp up operations and create jobs. I am no supporter of the SBA — everyone I’ve ever known that has ever talked to them has ended up with an application for a second mortgage — but this is crazy.

So when all is said and done, I think that more than being “still in the gravitational pull of the Great Recession” and perhaps headed for a “double-dip recession,” it is more intellectually honest to say that from the standpoint of the typical American, there is no recovery: we still aren’t finding jobs, we still are having trouble paying the mortgage, we are still declaring bankruptcy at an alarming rate. Fine, maybe our largest corporations are still making plenty of money, but without the American consumer having money in pocket to buy goods and services, GDP growth can only be somewhere between shaky and an illusion.

In Closing: Uncle Shelby; turns out the kids are bored and not learning the things they should; on the newly revised dietary guidelines; fun with Google auto-complete; biggest banks in the world (and the ones that don’t exist anymore; and please, please drive safely this weekend.