retro-man

It's the weakest recovery since WWII, not the weakest on record. I think it's important to make that distinction. It's not a weaker recovery than from The Great Depression - an event with which it was on par. (It would have been every bit as severe if not for the mechanisms put in place during the Depression.) It's not a weaker recovery than other countries are having from the same event. Credit bubble collapses going back to the Panic of 1893 have been characterized by slow recoveries since, by their very nature, they involve a long period of debt reduction during a slow economy - a double handicap. There is no fast recovery from a credit bubble bust. Rather than point out the obvious and inevitable: it's a slow recovery, why don't we just go back to pointing the finger at who caused it: a bunch of liberal bleeding hearts and their screw-up friends who wanted to own houses and consumer goods they couldn't afford, or a rogue financial system unchained by a militantly anti-regulatory Washington establishment, starry-eyed with their childlike Friedmanian faith in "the markets", presiding over an economy whose real fundamentals had long since been gutted by globalization and financialization. http://www.washingto...ourse/?page=all http://www.mckinsey...._path_to_growth p.s. Nothing wrong with dividends. Compared with relying on share prices and market churn to generate investor rewards it seems to me they would tend to incentivize a longer-term view toward the health of a company.

I don't think we'e talking about whether something is legal or not. A lot of chicanery hides behind the law. The fact is, he was running as the man to solve the middle class problem, and if people saw that he paid little or no taxes on a huge (unearned) income, it would put a bad taste in their mouths - legal or not. That is most likely the reason he didn't disclose. It is possible to behave ethically under the law - let us remind here that "legal" and "ethical" are two different words carrying two different meanings. It is also possible to work the system. It's not just welfare bums who know how to do that.

Having just dealt - in rapid succession - with building departments in 6 different cities in 6 different states, I am not deaf to your rants against bureaucracy. Some of them were great (Durham NC as a matter of fact was great), some of them were absurd (Cincinnati). I have a sense that there's a happy medium somewhere between Port au Prince (Haiti - we saw how effective their building code enforcement was) and Cincinnati.

Looks like interesting reading. I just printed a bathroom copy. It looks like we are having a double whammy of an over-leveraged private sector settling out debts before resuming the spending binge (consumer spending accounting for about 70% of GDP before the bust) and a public sector that, for both real economic reasons (it was too big) and political reasons (it was too big), is in a similar retrenchment. Looks like the article attributed 2/3 of the weakness to the latter. Indeed, as anybody paying attention to the news knows, public spending is decimated. Looking in my immediate area, we have small towns disincorporating, fire and police departments closing facilities and leaving some areas in limbo, or underserved, libraries closing branches or cutting back hours, etc.. My own little - relatively prosperous - suburban town this year did not put out its hanging flower baskets downtown as it has every year since I have lived here. It is not difficult to imagine the impact of these retrenchments on the local economy. The situation with the private sector, as I understand it from other readings, is pretty typical of credit bubble recessions. It may be slightly misleading to compare the current recession against "all recessions" without mentioning this.

All grown up and still afraid of the dark.

They flew a '67 Ford off a ski jump at Lake Placid too. Unfortunately I couldn't find a YouTube of it - but the ad was on TV I remember.

Geez Richard, Elon Musk did what to your sister now? The car is stunning. It's magnificent. Tesla is not going to become the next Ford or Toyota - but they are serving a function that Ford or (to a lesser degree) Toyota can't or won't do. They are absolutely advancing the state of the art. Not only that, they are taking something that could be wonky (Prius) and making it aspirational. Tesla has made electric cars exciting. You're not the Birkenstock type? Fine, put on your Ferragamos and let's dance! All this talk about the balance sheet ..... leave that to the investors. A lot of people - Nikola Tesla himself - have advanced the state of their art greatly, yet died broke. That's not the point. Something is brought into the world that makes the others sit up and take notice. Has the Apollo program paid for itself yet? I'm thinking not. Does that mean we shouldn't have gone? I'm thinking not. We've talked about Wright before: he was a shameless self promoter - a huckster in the great 19th century tradition. His buildings cost triple what they were supposed to. The roofs leaked. He left a trail of human wreckage behind him - but look at the gift he left the world in his buildings, and the influence he had not only on the profession, but on the built environment as a whole.

I'm as liberal as they come. I started working when I was 16 (a few years before that, cutting lawns, baby-sitting, and subbing on friends' paper routes), and never stopped. I worked restaurants, gas stations, construction, aerospace, graveyard shift in a roof truss factory while earning my undergraduate degree. I worked in cabinet shops and in construction while earning my Masters degree. I have worked plenty of 60 - 70 hour weeks in the last 20 years - missed plenty of holidays and birthdays and anniversaries. There are plenty, plenty others like me. My father was a successful business owner who worked his ass off, and who would have described his own politics as something akin to Nordic Socialism. You saw Jim Sinegal speak at the Democratic Convention. Bill Gates is a liberal, as is his father. I would say both of them have created a few jobs. But they were wealth creators - not just wealth concentrators. I think Republicans would serve themselves well to start to recognize the difference and make an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff. (The primaries did show some dawning of this notion.)

Conservatives would be business majors (except for Warren Buffet, Paul Krugman, and David Korten) and liberals would be liberal arts majors (except for Jon McNaughton or Dennis Miller). That's why Romney is so far outraising Obama in the 2012 Presidential auction. As you well know, I am not much given to economic rationalism. I believe that wealth is a very poor and limited measure for human and societal wellbeing. It is also a very poor and limited indicator of intelligence. (By the way, I also believe that IQ is a poor and limited measure of intelligence, and a very poor predictor of wealth.) Unfortunately, we live in a society and an age that has delegitimized every other measure but money. You want to save the planet? Better state the business case. Want to save grandma? Better state the business case. Want art and music? Great literature and history? It better pencil out. This is the pathology of our age.

You may find this surprising, but in the wake of 911 I actually wished we would have created a couple of glass parking lots. Once we found out where the perps were from, nuke their mother's villages and their holy sites. It would have cost us some in world image, and we would've experienced a horrified and intimidated silence from enemies and allies alike instead of the outpouring of support and solidarity that we did experience (until it was squandered) - but we would have had every secret service in the world out doing our bidding to prevent that from happening again. Hell, Saudi Arabia (what was left of it) would've gone to Afghanistan for us and taken out Bin Laden. Pakistan would've had every Madrasa shut down and a proper public school system in place by the end of the year. I think you underestimate what a President Obama or a President Gore would've done in the same situation. Don't forget which party prosecuted WWII, and stood down Kruschev in the Cuban missile crisis. One thing a President Obama or a President Gore would not have done, I believe, is squander American lives, fortune, and political capital by invading the wrong country on a pack of lies. We may be playing cat and mouse with Saddam to this day, but we'd be doing it with about $825 billion more in the bank, and about 4,000 young Americans still alive. As for world reaction to the election of Obama, it is a complex issue - you allude to the point that many people were thrilled to see Americans break the race barrier. This is no doubt true, both at home and abroad. I will freely admit that it was true for me. (I hasten to point out that I would not have been thrilled if it had been Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton that did it, and that I did favor Obama over McCain in policy matters.) However, I think there are multiple dimensions to the world reaction. A large part of it was relief: relief to discover that we had not after all devolved into a pack of swaggering mendacious Neo-Con troglodytes - that there was still some trace of decency and a modicum of intelligence left. It was not just about race: it was about what kind of person is that 6'-7" kid on the playground after all? Ok, he was just a little crazy there for awhile, but he seems to be alright now. Phew. Nor do I think they necessarily want an apologetic and weak USA, or to remain "on the dole" How much foreign aid does the US provide to Canada? To Australia? To France? The Marshall plan and the MacArthur plan were repaid by the 1970s. Iraq is the biggest recipient of US foreign aid (we should've stayed out of there), followed by Israel. I realize that I went a little over the top with the education thing. There are conservatives who are thoughtful, intelligent, principled and decent. I see that quality in many people on here. You may also find this hard to believe, but when somebody expresses to me eloquently why they believe in individual initiative and rights compared to government management - even if there might be a downside - "I would rather die poor and at liberty than rich and in chains" when convictions are expressed this way I am actually able to see the point sometimes (this is the great weakness of liberals - the willingness to see the other side). But for myself, there are other bargains I would make.

Grasping much? Look, there's a couple of reasons Romney is neck and neck with Obama in this country, and so far behind in the rest of the world (except for Pakistan):1.) We live in a country where 40% of the population thinks the earth was created in 6 days, 6,000 years ago, 18% of the people believe the sun revolves around the earth, 75% of people can correctly name the Three Stooges, but only 40% can name the three branches of government, and 24% have no idea who we declared independence from. I understand this argument can cut either way, but I have reason to believe it cuts my way. It's not an exact match to the red state / blue state map, but there's a high degree of correlation. 2.) When you ask Americans "Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?" The answer for most people is "No" in the very limited sense that question is calculated to appeal to - and with complete myopia about the larger issues, complete ignorance of history, and complete amnesia about how we got here, it has the intended effect, appealing to short-sighted self-interest. The rest of the world is not susceptible to that question. Removed from it, they are free to take the longer view, see the role that America has traditionally played, and might still play in the world, and they calculate that a progressive social and economic reformer will do more good for their countries, and for the world as a whole, than a Plutocratic Neo-con posse picking clean what's left of a once great country. Believe it or not, most of the countries on that list don't want to see us fail. I know from my work and travels abroad - especially thinking back to the wake of 9/11 - that there is a tremendous reservoir of goodwill and admiration in the world for America and for Americans. A tremendous nostalgia for what we once were. xr7g428 stated the loss of that America so eloquently in a different post not long ago (even though he and I have reached vastly different conclusions about how it was lost). I also know that much of the world thinks a large part of this country have taken leave of our senses. Before you just reflexively shoot from the hip and believe part of that poll and not other parts, think long and hard about the sense of rejoicing throughout the world that attended the election of Barack Obama 4 years ago (I know it was a slap in the face, painful for any Bush supporter to see, and the urge to explain it away somehow very powerful) on the heels of 8 years of unilateral foreign policy, false war, extraordinary rendition, gulags, waterboarding, Halliburton, and the whole nine yards. The key to that poll is simple: they don't want us to go back. I don't think Romney will take us back - not that far back - but I don't think his policies will take us forward either.

Does this mean we don't have to hear any more crap about Obama's "apology tour"?

I appreciate the good wishes, but be careful what you wish for. I'm afraid this dysfunctional, poop-flinging, filibustering, mendacious, pandering, sold-to-the-highest-bidder, government we have might actually be the government we deserve.

Tell me again how Obama is causing America to lose the respect of other countries in the world?

By the way: fun poll released by BBC world opinion a few days ago. Of the countries surveyed only Pakistan showed majority support for Romney over Obama. None of the other countries surveyed were even close. Here's 2 clues for the clueless, to demystify these results: - Drone strikes under President Obama (for Pakistan) - The memory of the last President the Republican Party gave us (for every other country in the world)

We were in for 13 rough years no matter who was in the white house. Read any reputable analysis. Credit bubble busts all the way back to the Panic of 1873, and including the Great Depression, are characterized by a 'U' shaped recovery with dampened economic growth and persistent unemployment. Neither of these guys or their parties has the cure. Unfortunately, every Presidential candidate since 1980 learned from Carter what happens when you talk squarely about the economy to the American people instead of blowing sunshine up their ass. It pains me to see Obama shrink away from the honest hard talk, but it is also absurd to see Romney talking out one side of his mouth about how the government doesn't create jobs, then out the other side say that he has "a plan to create 12,000,000 new jobs" - when we elect him head of the government. Anybody not see the absurdity in this? Anybody think he is being seriously honest when he makes these claims? Puhleeze. David Stockman said it best about Romney's brand of job creation: Read the whole piece by Stockman here LINK. I don't agree with a lot he has done in his career - he was a devoted supply-sider back in the day, but his criticism of late-stage metastatic finance capitalism here is right on. And Romney is the angel of late stage metastatic finance capitalism in this election. But why should his economic policy be any different than his overriding political policy: opportunism?

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Hey, I gotta give you credit for trying.

Because I didn't think he would perpetuate the policies that wrecked it (tax cuts for the rich, unfunded wars, deregulation of a rogue financial sector), because he promised to do something about our piss-poor healthcare system, because he opposed invading Iraq, because McCain was looking a little out of touch on the economy, because McCain's running mate was weak, and last but not least, because of my earnest belief that the entire Republican establishment had earned itself a 10 year long bitch slap for delivering us the worst President in US history, and my fervent hope that it would get it. Does that cover it?

There goes that damn ethnic vote again.

Look, we're all going to look at the facts and form our own conclusions about them. I tend to believe that there's actually about a 30 year lag between major policy shifts and their peak effects on the economy. That's why I can't pin all the blame on Dubbya. The movements in the 30s toward government expenditures on things like infrastructure ("stimulus money" at the time), social safety net (unemployment insurance and social security), toward regulation of the financial markets, and the rise of the union movement were felt first during the war (we wouldn't have had cheap aluminum fueling a robust aircraft industry here in the Northwest without the BPA before it, and the Oakridge nuclear lab wouldn't have happened without the TVA), but really reached their own in the 50s and 60s as graduates of the GI bill, commerce rolling on interstate highways, an educated workforce, super-productive farmlands the result of irrigation projects and rural electrification vaulted us to number one in the world in per capita income, educational attainment, life expectancy, standard of living, and military power. Some of those things - unemployment insurance in particular - were the only things standing between this last downturn and full-blown depression, Hoovervilles and all. What we are living out now: the "hollowization" of the American economy, is the inevitable result of the smashing of the union movement, the neglect of the infrastructure (or rather selling it off to the scrappers), the outsourcing of the middle class (to raise the profit margins of a relatively few investors), and the hysterical anti-government climate that fueled the deregulation that made the Great Recession possible. All of those things are the fallout from "The Reagan Revolution". I grew up in Roosevelt's America. My kids grew up in Reagan's America. I am deeply sorry that my generation failed to provide them the same caliber of country that my generation was provided by our parents and grandparents. Back to your question though - it was predicted by most economists (admittedly the same ones who didn't see it coming) that we would have a 'U'-shaped recovery from this recession: slowly bottoming out, bumping along the bottom for awhile, then slowly climbing back out - not a 'V' shaped recovery, which seems to be what all those dumping on Obama after 42 months in office are naively (or disingenuously) expecting. The economy will gradually recover, unless we slip off the shelf once more and go in for a double dip. I think this will happen either under Obama or under Romney. I do think that there needs to be more critical thinking about supply-side economics, and of the two candidates Romney is the stronger proponent. Many on here have celebrated, or at least defended, the new 2-tier labor agreements being negotiated with the UAW for domestic auto production and the "facts of life" of the value of labor in a global economy. I read an interesting article the other day that spells out what I intuitively know about these arrangements and the global labor pool that makes them possible: they will come back to bite us. They are a severe tax on the future. Autoworkers earning less than $30k / yr. will make a very poor consumer class. They will be able to save very little for their own retirements, and contribute very little toward their children's educations. They will contribute very little toward the tax base that provides for the common good. Romney talks a lot about putting Americans back to work, and making Americans prosperous again. I don't see how the "smart" business practices of Bain Capital (and its ilk) accomplishes that at all. Unless you think working at Staples for $10 or $12 / hr. is the key to a middle class lifestyle.

Thank you come again.

I have said many times (so here, I'll say it again for you): The economy is not going to regain a semblance of health until sometime after 2020. The issues are that deep, and that long-standing. If you believe that either Obama or McCain could have stepped into the steaming pile of doodoo left by the Bush administration (let me clarify here that I am not pinning the entire blame on Bush - only that he was uniquely qualified to make the worst of a bad situation) then you must believe in the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny too. Like it or not, Obama came in with 850,000 job losses a month, and has turned it around to at least a tepid gain per month of 40,000 or so. I call that a turnaround.

Yep - I keep remembering the Saabaru. People may think they don't like Citroens now (I happen to like them, having ridden in some recent models). Imagine what a dose of Cruze will do for the Citroen C6.

What I am suggesting is that the improvement in efficiency, and outsourcing, diverted Americans away from real productive work that might have commanded a decent wage in the real scheme of things. Many economists have remarked on this, both at home and abroad - the Japanese have a term for it that roughly translates as "hollowization" of the economy. Think of it as shipping containers of money to first Japan, then China. To compensate for this loss of real wealth coming from real material production, we put spouses to work (this is remarked on in the article too), then when that ran out of steam, we started borrowing against our homes, which a de-regulated financial industry was all too happy to oblige, with specious derivatives and useless financial instruments. (See also "financialization"). When that bubble had run its course, there was nowhere else to go. So, I would argue that we did suddenly need 4% of our population to stop working (and a healthy percentage of the rest to work on diminished wages). Because we had shoveled all the money either overseas, or to the top (the GINI index, and the gap between median and average net worth is telling in this respect), and there is not enough left for the great consumer middle to keep the engine going - not the way it had been going. Basically we've been living on borrowed time since around 1970 (probably grbeck would agree with me on that one) - though I like to blame Reagan for instituting a transformation that, although seeming to help for awhile, ultimately had a disastrous effect on the middle class - when carried mindlessly too far (which has been David Stockman's message lately). The smashing of PATCO was emblematic of what would happen to decent wage jobs as a result of the political climate set in motion by "the Reagan Revolution". The voodoo economic ideology of trickle-down has been equally disastrous.