I have honestly no idea who this guy is, but what struck me is that he seems to be saying what a lot of you have been saying:
I honestly don’t know how long people around the world are going to watch their wages, benefits, and pensions slashed while bankers are bailed out and corporate profits and banskters bonuses are going through the roof. But at some point there has to be a tipping point. We’ve put that tipping point off here in the states, because the Koch boys and the Republicans pulled the greatest trick ever, running a faux populist campaign that managed to elect the banksters best friends, and the tea partiers are too consumed with hatred for Obama and the Democrats to realize they’ve been conned again by the big money boys, but if the GOP really does seriously go after Medicare or Social Security, I imagine there will be quite a shitstorm.
Unless, of course, they exempt everyone over 50, and then the Boomers and the Greediest Greatest generation get one more change to roger the rest of the nation.
Meanwhile, of course, the lesson the Democrats learned from the midterm appears to be that they didn’t cozy up to the money boys enough. Yeehaw.
Not to mention the White House is, by all apparent signs, clueless.
Joe Beese
I honestly don’t know how long you plan to keep supporting this president, Mr. Cole.
What’s the plan? Re-elect him in ’12 and then “hold his feet to the fire”?
WyldPirate
John Cole sez…
Fixed.
John Cole
Me, yesterday, talking to WyldPirate:
And I say something negative about the WH, and who shows up? Joe and Wyld, leading the charge.
I think I’ll vote for Nader in 2012. That will fix everything!
arguingwithsignposts
@John Cole:
Funny, JC – WP and JB are just talking pie to me. Of course, an entire thread full of pie comments is rather tiring after a while.
Martin
@John Cole:
T,FTFY
wmd
As for who that guy is – he’s a member of the European parliament from the UK.
Conveniently the UK still has a currency under national control, meaning it can be devalued unilaterally. Debts denominated in British pounds can be paid back with pounds that have lost purchasing power. Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain … other countries that have adopted the Euro can’t do this and he’s making the point that saving the Euro may not be an option.
freelancer
Joe and WP want a Pony.
I’m about a third of the way through Taibbi’s Griftopia right now, I want to take a trip to Wall St. with a pair of brass knuckles and a mace. Yes, White House isn’t attacking this right. No, I wouldn’t have any other political figure in the world in Obama’s stead.
El Cid
Yeah, you wouldn’t ever want to discuss any topic without narrowing it down to choice of whom to vote for in the next election, since whatever you speak publicly about your thoughts on some issue will identify you as either objectively pro or objectively anti towards a political figure. With us or against us, and all.
Suck It Up!
@arguingwithsignposts:
lol. does it make you hungry?
Bnut
It was not the “greatest generation” that fucked things up for us. It was your generation John, along with my fathers. You were GOP for many years, my father was an apathetic liberal. For people my age, give ONE hopeful sign that in 20 years when we take over things will be OK.
WyldPirate
@John Cole:
At least we’re consistent.
When he does something praiseworthy, I’ll let you know. It’s been a long damn while, though, and, given past performance, I expect it will be a while longer.
Now let the Obots come out and and tell us again of the brilliance behind freezing Fed pay–which amounts to about 0.05% of the deficit–is such a great move. I wanna hear once more how this triangulation thingy is going to rock the Rethugs world and get them on the run.
Marc
I know this will sound like nitpicking, but the Depression/World War II generation isn’t the problem here. They were one of the most liberal generations in American history until the millennials came along, and they were staunch supporters of the social safety net.
Unfortunately, they are largely gone now. Today’s seniors mostly come from the generation after the “Greatest Generation,” aka the Silent Generation, aka John McCain’s generation, aka douchebags. And they will, by and large, happily pull the ladder up behind them.
El Tiburon
We may need an in-house critic call here, but is this wading into Firebagger territory?
I’ve said for a while that if we haven’t tipped yet, then it just ain’t gonna happen. But accepting that it appears that Obama ain’t getting it done is a fine start. I don’t blame Obama; it’s the system.
We have to realize that the politicians using the system ain’t gonna change shit.
It has to be We the People changing it from the outside. Not a bloody and violent revolution, but definitely something a little more than harsh words on a website.
I am not sure what it will take, but I do sense that the anger and frustrations from the Teatards (real or not) is now beginning to be truly felt from those of us on the left who were giving Obama the time to prove himself and his administration.
Many of us are now realizing that the country is not getting better but a lot worse.
Maxwel
For some time I’ve had this vision of banksters being thrown from their top floor.
freelancer
@WyldPirate:
You know who else was consistent…
cyntax
The problem with reading Digby’s posts is that they’re way too cogent to ignore and don’t help me cut down on my drinking.
Judas Escargot
I have three honest questions.
(1) Who is this guy?
(2) Why do he and others who agree with him hate the Euro so much?
(3) What would he and others who agree with him propose to replace the Euro with, and how would they get there without causing massive financial chaos?
The ‘Great Harvest of Ireland’ taking place now is disgusting, and could be a sign of things to come, this is true. But I’m not convinced that what’s going on there is necessarily (or totally) the fault of the Euro.
J
@El Cid: an excellent point!
General Stuck
just wait till the House in the lame duck passes a one time 250 dollar supplement to SS for seniors because they have gotten no COLA the past two years, only to see the Senate wingnuts filibuster it under the banner of reducing the deficit.
“GET GOVERNMENT HANDS OFF MY MEDICARE”
MORANS
Evolved Deep Southerner
I will keep re-posting this proposed political ad from poster Jennifer, from July 24, 2010, until someone gives me a decent answer as to why this approach, and variations on this theme in response to whatever bullshit the GOP would use to rebut it, would not work:
The GOP would respond with some bullshit, sure. Respond in kind – in the simplest terms possible – to call bullshit on their bullshit. And do it every single time. Let not one piece of bullshit go unanswered.
Graphically stack up how much of this country’s wealth the top 2 percent own versus the rest of us. Ross Perot got one vote out of five with line graphs back in ’92.
When some CEO answers with how much taxes are stifling his company, call that shit out; show how much that company – and corporate America in general – paid in taxes over the last year or three versus the amount of taxes their average employee had to eat.
When someone says the wealthy are “the engines of job creation in this company,” answer with how many jobs they shifted offshore to save a buck. Compare their most recent quarterly profits with how many people they pink-slipped.
Glenn Beck? Ha! Lay out how much THAT fucker makes off the rubes each year, and throw in something about him hawking gold for kickbacks as a cherry on top. Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin … it will work against any of them.
This could all be done devastatingly well in 30-second spots, folks. Not all of it at one time, of course. But do it 30 seconds at a time. You can’t eat this elephant in one bite (no pun intended.)
And keep doing it, and doing it, and doing it. And don’t wait for a damn election to start. Start now with the cheap time slots.
This is a strategy that can piece off some of the po-ass Fox voters busting their asses to make it in 21st Century America just like we are.
We assume that audience is immutable. It is anything but. We just haven’t tried. And if you don’t frame it all as the rich versus the poor, best of luck to all of us, because the time for that is now.
Keith G
My question to Dr Krug would be, “How can at least part of our unemployment problem not be structural?”
The manufacturing sector continues to shrink into nothingness and those jobs aint coming back. The real effects of those lost manufacturing jobs were hidden for two decades, first by the tech bubble and then by the real estate bubble. Both of those events fired construction and retail orgies that hid the fact that the basis of wealth creation in this society had indeed changed, a…err..structural change. Maybe?
SRW1
“I have honestly no idea who this guy is…”
Nigel Farage, Chairman of UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party, and a member of the European parliament for that party. Former Tory who left the Conservative Party because he claimed that John Major had sold out the UK to Europe. The programmatic point of the I in UKIP being the independence of poor Britain from the joke of continental suppression. In other words, a Little Englander.
I won’t listen to what he has to say in the clip, because though he may be right on this occasion, he is a stupid loudmouth and to anybody who believes that Mr Farage is speaking out of concern for the little people, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn we should discuss.
Citizen Alan
It only takes a spark. I wonder which nation will be the first to suffer domestic terrorism in response to the financial malfeasance of the elites. Not us, of course, since we’re a nation of supine cowards who will accept any debasement in response to our fear of terrorists, soshulists, and the Other of the Moment.
Midnight Marauder
@WyldPirate:
This might be the first time I’ve ever seen someone damn themselves with faint praise.
No, you won’t. Do you know how reasonable people can tell that you won’t? Because you write statements like this immediately after saying you will potentially find certain actions by President Obama as “praiseworthy”:
Unserious troll is unserious.
marcopolo
Ugh! Since I am not interested in joining the pie-fight(s) and I am of the belief that our political system has been captured by the moneyed interests meaning at present I don’t see a lot of useful policy being passed by our government for the foreseeable future, let me instead suggest one small positive action that each of us can take every day: spend your money wisely as what you spend your money on every time you pull it out is a vote for the kind of world you want to live in. At this point, I submit that the voting you do with your pocketbook is going to have more influence on your surroundings than your vote in any election beyond the purely local level. Also too, since this is the time of the year when the powers that be most want to tell us that our truly important role in life is as consumers; this is the best time to start using that consumption as a political and economic act. Support the companies, goods, and services that are the most aligned with the way you want the world to be. Those of you who have bought stuff from the BJ store probably already understand this, but it really is something to keep in mind all the time.
Cat Lady
“There are no nations; there are no peoples. There is only one holistic system of systems – one vast and immane interwoven interactive multivariant multinational dominion of dollars… which determines the quality of life on this planet. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today.”
We are all Ireland now.
Joe Beese
@WyldPirate:
.
You know, sometimes I seriously wonder whether the hate from the Obots is fueled by envy of the luxury we enjoy of not having to bullshit ourselves.
To them, our lot must seem so unfairly easy. When Obama drone bombs Pakistani children, we get to say the obvious – that it’s a war crime – without having to make up some rationalization about why it’s a justified thing to do.
Rick Taylor
I think I’m coming to similar conclusions as you. It seems to me the course Democrats need to take is obvious. The Republicans will not allow them to get much of anything done over the next two years, and as a result the country is going to suffer; there’s no way around that now. The only thing we can do is to broadcast the right message, and to make sure the right people get blamed for what happened. Democrats should be stressing jobs, jobs, jobs. They should be pushing for more stimulus. They won’t be able to pass anything, but they should show the people who want the government to do what it can for those who aren’t necessarily extraordinarily rich, who still comprise the majority of the electorate, that we’re on their side. The Republicans have no interest currently in even pretending to care about the government creating jobs (which in their ideology is an impossibility); it is staggering that the Democrats have shown so little interest in taking advantage of this.
I can’t understand why we’re still talking about bipartisanship at this late date. Republicans will not respond to it, pundits will give the administration no credit for attempting to be bipartisan, it’s a lose-lose proposition. If the death of the Start Treaty doesn’t convince them that any attempts at reasonable negotiation are doomed to failure, I don’t know what will.
slag
Will someone please explain structural v. cyclical unemployment for me? I read that Krugman post, and I’m still dubious. What would structural unemployment look like exactly (in concrete terms, please)? This:
from Krugman doesn’t really explain the question to my satisfaction. But that’s probably because I don’t get the whole concept. Maybe expound on that? Somebody?
Martin
@Evolved Deep Southerner: Of course, given current campaign laws, nothing would stop those same 1% from going all-in against such an effort.
I think people underestimate how much wealth is collected in that group. They represent something like 20% of the wealth in the nation, but they have 50%+ of the discretionary wealth in the nation. In short, you cannot wage a campaign against the wealthy that is dependent on finances and expect to win. They effectively run the show. If you want to work against that population, you need to find a mechanism to do it that can’t be overcome by money. This last election was but a shadow of what would come. For all the complaining about the Chamber of Commerce spending, one candidate for governor in CA spent 3x as much – of her own money. Once you start dropping 55% estate taxes into the discussion, individuals literally have billions at stake. They might as well spend it to protect it, and they will.
People just don’t realize how little political power the bottom 99% really have in conventional politics.
Barney
Farage? He’s the leader of the UK Independence Party, which is the nearest the UK has to the Tea Party. They’re a ‘protest vote’ in the European elections, for the people who think the Tories are too keen on European cooperation and immigration. Their policies are:
Leave the EU
a flat income tax
deregulate business
end nearly all immigration (coming out of the EU achieves a lot of this, since the EU allows free movement between countries, but they want to go further)
double the number of people in prison
increase the military budget by 40%
use vouchers for schools, and the exam at age 11 to select for high aptitude schools
ignore global warming, because they don’t believe in it
ban the burqa and niqab in public buildings
About the only policies that are not Tea-Party-like are the retention of the NHS, and the reintroduction of student grants.
If commenters here have sounded like him, you have a problem.
slag
@Joe Beese:
Really? Because I always assumed the dislike toward you was fueled by the fact that you’re head-shakingly trite and eye-rollingly predictable.
General Stuck
@slag:
I think mostly what is meant by using structural unemployment these days are the effects of off shoring, and automization, though I’m sure our econ whizes have other stuff I don’t know about to add to that list.
WyldPirate
@Keith G:
Krugman defines structural unemployment in terms the most moronic Obot can understand.
Clearly something the Obama administration doesn’t understand, either.
slag
@Keith G:
I’m with you. But not being an economist, I assume that the term “structural” has a more concrete meaning here. And that more factors are in play than meets the layman’s eye.
Midnight Marauder
@slag:
Ahh, but you exist in the Real World, whereas Joe Beese exists in an echo chamber sustained by his deluded imagination.
Bit of a slight difference there, I reckon.
BombIranForChrist
But, of course, we must re-elect Obama and those very same Democrats, because like, Palin is wacky.
Nice country we have here.
WyldPirate
@Joe Beese:
The Obots are exactly like the assclowns on the Rethug side that excused every idiotic and criminal act the Bush administration committed.
Some of them would–as I said in an earlier thread—excuse Obama for skull-fucking a kitten.
Martin
@slag: Cyclical unemployment is related to changes in labor demand for an economy that is structurally similar. That is, if demand for services goes down, but services remain 30% of the economy, then you’d expect when the economy picks up that services would remain 30% of the economy and all of those unemployed service workers would find jobs again.
Structural unemployment refers to when the economy changes structurally. If we lost half of our industrial base, those jobs won’t come back when the economy rebounds. Those are jobs permanently lost, and if you’re trained for an industrial job and are laid off, you are looking at retraining, not at sending out better resumes.
Farming historically is a good example of structural job loss. The number of farming jobs in the US has been declining steadily for 2 centuries, being replaced with other kinds of jobs – engineering, genetics, chemists, etc. who have been ‘industrializing’ the farming industry. Structural unemployment usually marks a shift in labor demand. For every job lost in one sector, you find (something approximating) a job in a totally different sector. Amazon is an example of shifting retail jobs to web services/IT. That requires a flexible labor pool, which is something we don’t have. It’s also rarely a net gain for labor. Usually you lose more jobs than you gain, but the jobs gained are typically ‘better’ jobs – require more training, are more productive, pay better. Our young people aren’t adapting to this (not an hour ago I had someone interning in the WH in my office bemoaning how hard it is for the Feds to find qualified engineers that are citizens) nor are laid off workers.
Cat
UKIP or the UK Independence Party are borderline xenophobes and closet racists. They claim to be the Non racist British nationalist party though so I could be a bit off on the closet racists.
Thats why you’ve never heard of him, he’s right of the Torys.
Keith G
@slag: Here’s a very over simplified description. I grew up in NW Ohio in the 60s and 70s. Many jobs were tied to the automotive industry.
During a cyclical recession, inventory and production had exceeded demand. GM would close a few shifts for a few weeks/months. Parts manufacturing and truckers would slow down for a bit. Eventually inventory would erode and/or demand would increase and the shifts would restart.
Now, the buildings that housed many of those factories aren’t even standing. That is structural in spades.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Martin: Didn’t that gubernatorial candidate lose in Cali?
Ross Hershberger
@Marc:
Let’s not let them all off the hook too easily. There’s Civil Rights to be considered. Plenty of the people who returned from saving the Western World in WW II didn’t feel too favorably toward sharing that world fully with women and blacks. Civil Rights was/is a struggle and plenty from our grandparents’ generation were on the opposite side of that fight from us.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@WyldPirate: It’s just amazing that people don’t find your and Joe’s calm, well-reasoned, substance-based arguments persuasive.
General Stuck
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Though compared to the new troll Kenneth, those two seem like little dolts of sunshine. Kenneth is a fucking horror show.
TD
Farage is very much the Sarah Palin of the European Parliament. He is all resentment, all the time. Be careful about lending this guy legitimacy, he pursues no constructive avenues with his discontent.
Midnight Marauder
@WyldPirate:
Which means that not all Obots are “like assclowns on the Rethug side?” Which means that you didn’t even think through your own comparison? Which means that you have no point?
Martin
@Evolved Deep Southerner: Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is that she was willing to spend $140M of her own money to lose. Imagine what these guys will spend if their own fortunes are being directly attacked.
I’m not using it as an excuse to do nothing, but Congress knows the score as well and asking them to attack the heart of the problem is effectively suicide for them. Look at how many very wealthy Republicans ran for office in 2010, and how many of them actually won. Rick Scott spent $73M to win in Florida, with the enviable resume of having caused a $1.7B Medicare fraud fine. $1.7B in Medicare fraud, and the guy wins in Florida. If someone put that in a novel, nobody would believe it.
Cat
@Martin:
A) Its hard to find Engineers that will work for what the Gov’t will pay, especially entry level Engineer positions at the Gov’t.
B) The way GS ratings works make it even worse, i.e. the dearth of high level positions that are actually open for outsiders as opposed to a fake posting to promote someone already on staff, thus making it hard to transition from Private to Public sector.
Don’t even get me started on positions that are ‘open’ but really they are just wasting your time to put on a good show so they can place an internal candidate. They make it real easy to just give up on Gov’t Jobs.
C) You are leaving out the most important indicator of structural unemployment is driving unemployment, full employment in another sector with rising wages.
slag
@Martin: OK. I get that. And here’s Krugman (courtesy of WyldPirate‘s rare dalliance with usefulness):
Now, I’m trying to figure out why having workers with the wrong skills would cause inflation. Because of unemployment benefits? Now, if that’s the case, wouldn’t lack of demand be less of a concern than it appears to be? Or is lack of demand not really a concern, after all?
WyldPirate
@Midnight Marauder:
Means no such of a thing. There can be different degrees of Obot assclownishness as is obvious by your idiocy and inability to read.
Do you pick nits much?
Cat
@slag:
My guess would be the demand for goods stayed steady but the goods were scarce due to the inability to produce the goods since there was a lack of workers.
Midnight Marauder
@Evolved Deep Southerner:
True enough, but Rick Scott dropped about $60 million of his own money to win the Florida governor’s race.
Although, according to Wikipedia, “The Fort Myers News Press quoted Rick Scott as saying in total he spent $78 million of his own money on the campaign.”
General Stuck
@Cat:
While this is true, and has been for a long time, like since when Reagan was doing all the hiring freeze stuff, the most likely avenue for transitioning from private to public is by first getting a seasonal or temp slot, many or which will turn into perm positions automatically, or by applying for open slots when they are advertised as in house already. At least that is how it worked for the agencies I worked for. Was initially a sly way of getting around hiring freezes, but become largely SOP for bringing in private sector people.
molosky
If you are suggesting some sort of far left-right convergence on economics, please elaborate. As a fan of BJ, I shudder to think its readers have anything in common with the UKIP. If you simply mean “you guys both like to complain” that is not too meaningful. Of course we all think Pat Buchanan has something right on occasion, but do not be seduced. As is said above, these guys are the Tea Party of Europe and they have nothing to offer in terms of solutions. The “serious” people over here think the Tea Partiers are great. If the “serious” people there think that the right-wing euro-skeptics are a destructive harbinger of xenophobic paranoia, then they are right and deserve to lose their sarcasm quotes.
slag
@Cat: I’m with you. That makes sense to me. But that doesn’t jive with the reality I’m seeing. Which is why I’m not buying the structural argument either. At least as Krugman explains it, that is.
In which case, hopefully, the Administration’s meeting about this question wasn’t a very long one.
Keith G
@WyldPirate: Ok, so Krug says
I respect the man, but in this instance – saying that inflation is the key to ID’ing structural unemployment – doesn’t seem to explain the role played by the Fed’s obsessive quest to tamp down all chances of increasing inflation.
Krug again
Wage growth is slowing in part do to increase costs of other compensation, right? I think sometimes the ghods of economics, like our generals, spend too much time looking at graphs and PowerPoint and not walking around the town. Which may be why Obama was right to ask these questions.
Martin
@Cat: Well, I’m not going to cry for those that find federal engineering jobs too low-paying. For every BEng getting turned out, there are 2 dozen BAs getting jobs at Starbucks – if they’re even that lucky. And the demand for domestic MEng and PhD is off the chart, but we’re filling well over half of the nations graduate slots with foreigners because there aren’t nearly enough domestic students willing to put the work in. To be blunt, US students are fucking lazy academically. In this job market we shouldn’t be importing students from China as fast as we can get visas issued.
These are good jobs. Jobs that we should be filling with unemployed Americans but they won’t make the effort to get the education. As it stands, we’re training the Chinese to blow past us in R&D.
And yes, you identify a strong consequence of structural unemployment. I was mostly focusing on what it was.
WyldPirate
@slag:
Increase in the cost of labor because of a shortage of workers with the proper skills equals an increase in costs which are passed on.
Ross Hershberger
@slag:
Not directly. When workers’ skills are mismatched to employment market needs, the market has to pay more for workers with the right skills. Lots of people stay un- or under-employed and the few who can fill the need have to be paid more. Higher pay means higher prices for goods and services. But only if it happens on a large scale.
I’m convinced by Dr. K’s arguments that our unemployment is not due to structural factors. It’s due to low demand for goods/services.
Hawes
The UKIP is a fringe party, true.
But you have to admire the British system of politics that produces incisive speaking like that. Prime Minister’s Questions is perhaps the most entertaining and enlightening political endeavor in the world… Cue dramatic distant thunder.
Because their political system relies on extemporaneous debate more than TV ad buys and canned, scripted soundbite “debates”, their politicians have to speak forcefully and succinctly.
Now, this is a stopped clock instance of a lunatic actually being right. The Euro has been shown to be a crock of shit sold as a jar of sparkle dust. He’s right. And he’s articulately right.
But he’s still an ass clown 90% of the time.
Cat
@General Stuck:
Doing a temp/seasonal position isn’t very attractive option, if its even an option, to people who would be taking a pay cut in the GS13 or higher pay bands.
Keith G
@Cat:
Were that the case then that would seem to indicate that such assumption do not take into account a fully global economy.
Midnight Marauder
@WyldPirate:
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on just a second there, fella. Let’s go over the actual words that you wrote in your previous post. And what I want you and everyone else to look for is whether you establish any degrees whatsoever of “Obot assclownishness.” So, here’s the first sentence:
Now, this strikes me as a pretty rigid sentence structure. You will note that you claim that Obots are “exactly like” the assclowns on the opposing side, even going so far as to italicize the words exactly like, which would seemingly indicate that you are about to make a direct comparison. I mean, let’s also note that you proceed in the very same aforementioned sentence to declare that assclown Rethuglicans excused “every idiotic and criminal act the Bush administration committed.” Again, you make yourself very clear in setting up your comparison…at least in the first half of this inanity.
Because all of your subpar trollery comes to an end when we hit the second half. Please note how your language suddenly shifts from being exact and rigid as to the assclownish nature of all Obots, to now possessing some hint that maybe Obots are not the monolithic group your fevered delusions have conjured up:
So here’s the chance for you to clarify your stance. Are all Obots apologetic assclowns, or are only some of them apologetic assclowns?
Yes, and yours in particular are DELICIOUS.
Martin
@slag:
Because demand drives up costs. Toss out all of the supply-side bullshit. If you want prices to go up, raise demand. If you have jobs without qualified workers, you’re going to raise wages to attract the limited number of qualified workers and to encourage others to get themselves qualified. I know a shitload of people that went to pharm school when those salaries spiked up to $200K. And don’t think that the cost of medication didn’t rise due to that significant increase in labor costs.
jl
@Barney: Thanks for the information on what seems to be Mr. UKPalin.
He had a few good slogans that pointed a some serious problems with the Euro, and wrongheadedness of the solutions proposed by European governing class (which for the most part is also, as in the U.S., the ruling financial class).
From what Barney says, it is doubtful that he has many good constructive solutions.
Even Palin hits a valid point of criticism once in awhile. I do not dismiss her every resentful complaint. So far, I have been able to dismiss all of her solutions, though, with a little thought or a little research.
Hawes
I think the whole “structural” vs “cyclical” argument falls into the realm of whether America is historically fucked or just temporarily fucked.
The argument for historically fucked (structural) ultimately lays the blame on the work force. They don’t have the right skills to compete in the current economy. Apparently carpenters need to learn how to amortize collateralized debt obligations.
The arguments for temporarily fucked are largely basic Keynesian macro. Demand for goods is low, so no one is hiring. History shows us that financial panics leave long term unemployment in their wake. Krugman is clearly saying that this is a typical post-financial meltdown unemployment crisis and it needs stimulative spending to jump start consumption/hiring.
But if you tell yourself that this is all structural because American workers don’t have the right skills, you really don’t have to do anything but sigh sagely and stroke your beard ruminatively.
Sentient Puddle
@Judas Escargot: Best answers I can give…
I don’t know, but others have addressed this already.
There’s a lot of reasons, but the short of it is that it throws all kinds of constraints on a country’s ability to direct its economy. By point of comparison, if America has a fiscal crisis, the Fed can step in, print money, adjust interest rates, and ultimately…well, the process isn’t exactly painless, but it gets us through. A country on the euro, on the other hand, has to go through the European Central Bank, and going through the same process fucks things up for everyone else on the euro, even though they might not have done anything wrong.
And that’s the thing…I don’t think anybody sees a way to do this without the chaos. That’s what makes this thing so scary.
General Stuck
@Cat:
True, I should have read Martin’s comment you were responding to. My bad.
Bob Loblaw
@El Cid:
Quiet you. Everything is about Obama and Obama alone, always. It’s the unyielding law of the blogosphere. There’s no place in this world for your kind of attitude when he have intellectual luminaries like WyldPirate and General Stuck hanging around…
WyldPirate
@Hawes:
Which is what the Obama administration is, in effect, doing.
Well, that and totally meaningless, impotent, empty gestures like freezing Fed wages.
slag
@Ross Hershberger:
But only if people can pay those prices for those goods and services, right? Isn’t that what Martin is getting at here? And that’s what free market ideologues bitch about when it comes to unemployment benes, right? Creating what they see as “false demand” or some such nonsense?
You people know everything. Love it!
M. Bouffant
Unless, of course, they exempt everyone over 50, and then the Boomers and the Greediest Greatest generation get one more chance [?] to roger the rest of the nation.
Yuck fu, J.C. If it weren’t for the greediest generation you’d be speaking German right now, & if it weren’t for their spawn (Me, among others.) you’d be living in an Xian white people’s paradise right now, & if you think your little web log would be allowed for 30 secs., think again!
Keith G
@Ross Hershberger:
Fair enough, but what is at root causing the low demand?
I would think that a large part of the drop in demand is due to losses of incomes due to the (structural) shift of jobs to off shore manufacturing. And there are misalignment between the purchasers of labor and those who wish to sell it and there is some resulting inflation (medical is one example) but quite frankly, international price competition makes the whole senario of:
…not as likely when price increases will be undercut by China, et al.
Ross Hershberger
Well, whether we’re historically or temporarily fucked depends on which ‘we’ we’re talking about. The recession’s already over for the wealthiest. Look at the markets and executive compensation. Wall Street bonuses. The Great Recession was just a blip for the top 1%. For the rest of us, and especially for the bottom 25% employment and wages will remain bad for quite a while. The layoffs will continue until spending improves, to adapt a phrase.
Mnemosyne
@Martin:
Not only that, he wins Florida on a platform of repealing the health insurance reform law. Because apparently committing Medicare fraud makes him an expert in health care.
That’s not just asking the fox to guard the henhouse, that’s telling him to take his pick of the chickens.
Cat
@Martin:
Nor are there enough who can actually do the work or who want to take on more student debt or whatever. There is an education crisis in the US in almost all fields.
The US’s engineering shortage is acute in one segment only, the mid level engineer who makes 65k a year. The McEngineering segment.
I imagine minorities could easily help fill the US Engineering needs. Goto an engineering department and it will be white men and foreign nationals. This is not right. There is a reason US minorities are are severely under represented in these fields and I don’t think its because minorities aren’t smart.
H1-B visa engineers make less money then US Citizens and can’t bargain for higher wages by finding better employment. I’m more then willing to compete against foreign workers on a level playing field, but an H1-B engineer will always be cheaper
Bob Loblaw
@Mnemosyne:
Honestly, I think it kinda does. In the same way smugglers are experts in international port security protocols.
Ross Hershberger
@Keith G:
Undoubtedly true, I don’t see that as a structural issue because there’s no structural solution. If Texas has jobs and Oklahoma has high unemployment, people can move. No so with Oklahoma and Taiwanese sweat shops.
Business moved production to chase higher short term profits and left many of their consumers without jobs. It ‘works’ because management compensation doesn’t take the long term good of the company into account, just the latest year or quarter.
Many jobs that have left will never be back. I’ve been in Detroit for 20 years and used to be in the Mainframe business until that went offshore during Y2K.
To look at unemployment as one number obscures the details. manufacturing is hurting bad. Non-manufacturing white collar is holding on and financial services companies have come roaring back.
jl
@slag:
I will try to help out, for all those commenters who are anguished about the meaning and use of the terms cyclical and structural unemployment. Though, I admit that IANAOM (I am not an official macroeconomist). I am an applied econometrician, that is, and economic statistician.
First off, any categorization of the types of unemployment into cyclical versus other types of unemployment is inherently a short run concept. So decades long secular declines in manufacturing share in employment does not fit into this scheme.
The three types of unemployment usually studied are
cyclical: due to changes in aggregate demand over the business cycle,
structural: due to shortages of the SUPPLY, or availability), of labor of the type in relatively higher demand, and the shortage is due to factors that cannot be changed in the short run without creating inflation due to increased costs of hiring more of these types of people in short supply.
frictional: due to process of search and selection of specifically matched openings and job seekers, by both job candidates and employers, due to reallocation of job openings in different economic sectors, new entrants (eg, school graduates) to the workforce, and retirement.
The evidence that most of the current unemployment is cyclical is that the share of total unemployment due to construction, real estate, and manufacturing, since the beginning of the downturn, is small. True, these sectors, especially construction and real estate, have been devastated but the increased unemployment is widely spread among all sectors. Unemployment in construction and real estate is small share of the total increase in unemployment.
Total unemployment always has components that are due to structural, cyclical and frictional factors. What Krugman, as other Keynesian economists are saying, is that MOST of the current unemployment is cyclical in nature, and that policies that increase aggregate demand in the short run will help most (though not all) of the unemployed.
I hope that clears things up.
I don’t have time to look for links on the estimated components of unemployment and the changes since early 2000s, but look in archives in Krugman’s blog, or DeLong, or Economists view, or Econbrowser, and you should find some posts that do have graphs and statistics.
General Stuck
@Bob Loblaw:
And here I thought you’d drunk my kool aid, loblolly. Ah well, the existential wilderness is where you thrive, not with us faithful obots/dems. So why do you stick around, is it just to keep we intellectual peasants amused with your galactic mental ginormity? Or, are you just lonely?
Jack Bauer
@SRW1:
Yup, that’s Farage.
burnspbesq
@Judas Escargot:
It’s not, strictly speaking, the fault of the Euro. But countries that have adopted the Euro have taken devaluation out of their economic policy toolkit, and have also effectively given up the right to go full metal Keynesian. Both of which have turned out to be Bad Things.
Cat
@Keith G: Was the economy global in the 70’s and 80’s? I don’t think it was.
In the present days I could believe its entirely possible a structural mismatch, like Britain had, could be smoothed over by cheap imported goods.
suzanne
@Joe Beese:
Merely a slightly more eloquent version of “YOU’RE JUST JEALOUS! Nyah nyah boo boo!”
toro toro
Farage is a despicable right-wing nutjob with a fixation on the ills of Europe.
His concern for We Irish is entirely opportunistic, and his policy proposals for us are no more in our interests rather than his than are the ECB’s.
Keith G
@Ross Hershberger:
@jl:
and others
A truly cool thing about Dr. Krugman is that he can be accessible. I have submitted a condensation of my questions to him directly. I’ll keep you informed.
burnspbesq
@Cat:
“Was the economy global in the 70’s and 80’s? I don’t think it was.”
It was global enough that I was basically required to take International Economics in order to get an Econ degree in 1978. Got a bad grade, and then Krugman came along a few years later and invalidated most of what I learned. Bastard.
slag
@jl: Excellent. __
…
__
Thanks for this info most of all. It clarifies things. Or at least adequately alleviates the dissonance.
WyldPirate
@General Stuck:
We’re just not in the “Goldilocks zone” for old Bob Loblaw, Stuck.
Morat20
Slag: The evidence that this is cyclical and not structural is a bit complex, but it boils down to:
“If it was structural, unemployment would hit only certain industries and be patchy around the country”. That is, you’d see…say…construction workers not finding work, but engineers having a booming market for their skillset. Morever, you’d see states that are heavily invested in specific industries seeing much higher unemployment than others.
In short, you could point to specific industries, jobs, or skill-sets that have ‘passed on’.
Cyclical, on the other hand, isn’t even — but isn’t nearly so patchy. You get that when business isn’t good. Layoffs across the whole economy, because businesses aren’t selling enough. That feeds into itself — laid off workers can’t buy goods, meaning less demand, meaning more layoffs….
More importantly, cyclical unemployment is a classic and straightforward response to a demand-based recession. Which is pretty much what we have. You can point to a lot of factors influencing it (not the least of which is that the lackluster demand of the last 5 years or so has been fueled almost entirely by borrowing) — but in the end, it’s simple:
The populace, in general, is broke and owes way too much money, and even those that have jobs are loathe to spend because they’re worried they might get laid off. So they don’t buy stuff.
You can talk about income inequality, and the massive amount of outright theft that the mortgage industry has been involved in (it’s like a fractal of fraud. The closer you look, the more people you see ripping other people off) as contributing factors — this recession has been a LONG time coming. It’s shocking it’s been this light.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
As the great George Carlin told us, this country is finished. Our Galtian overlords will just come out with a new generation of cell phone and this nation of obese porn sluts will lap it up.
Nick
@Ross Hershberger:
The recession may be over for them, but it wasn’t just a blip, or did you miss the part about the rich being responsible for the lion’s share of the mortgages that went under?
General Stuck
@WyldPirate:
Branes self with big rubber mallet. I must have really pissed off the FSM to deserve this.
Lavocat
And that’s really it in a nutshell, isn’t it?: “Just who the hell do you people think you are!?”
Take away democracy and all you are left with is nationalism and violence. Seems the Americans have to relearn what the British have long known.
Jill
Well, John, I guess you’re just going to have to line up all us born between 1945 and 1964 up against a wall and shoot us, then, right? I’ll tell you what. I’ll go quietly and accept getting screwed out of Social Security if I can get back all the money I’ve been paying into it for the last 38 years along with accumulated interest.
OK? Deal?
WyldPirate
@General Stuck:
Like me, I doubt that you’re losing too much fucking sleep over what some individual wanker on this blog thinks.
We’re both too old and contrary to waste our time on shit like that.
JerseyJeffersonian
@57 & @77
Combine your comments regarding the dearth of American engineering students, and add some other insights.
1) All of those eager beaver foreign engineering students? Dollar to a doughnut, most of those students have their education being paid for by their governments. This is more than likely not the case for many of the supposedly “lazy” American potential engineering students. Remember these are people who CAN do the math. Incurring a disabling level of indebtedness to have only SOME chance of working in their field while likely, as a consequence, being forced to delay starting up households and families because of that privately-held indebtedness serves as a powerful disincentive to embark upon that career.
2) Coupling this with the easy availability of foreign H-1B engineers in THIS country, it looks as if going into engineering could easily be seen as a sucker’s game. Not only do you go deeply in the hole to get qualified, but when you emerge saddled with debt, the CORPORATE LOBBYISTS have guaranteed that you will have to compete with what are essentially modestly-paid indentured servants for a job.
3) One might hope that universities would make more of an effort to recruit more American students for the engineering department, but if the cost of doing this is to pony up ever-scarce scholarship monies THEMSELVES, as opposed to merely holding out their hands to receive scholarship monies supplied to their foreign students by THEIR GOVERNMENTS, well, the answer is right in front of your face.
And the trajectory for a declining standard of education in productive occupations for American citizens is ever more firmly entrenched.
Ross Hershberger
@Nick:
Wealthy people have resources (and power) to get them through economic difficulties. They’re not living paycheck to paycheck like the bottom 25%. I doubt many who lost the over-mortgaged Florida second home actually had their basic standard of living affected as much as the families who lost their over-mortgaged only home.
jl
Should add that a randomly selected person’s transition through the states of employment, unemployment, and transition into and out of the labor force can be decomposed into cyclical, structural and frictional as well.
If MOST of the current unemployment were structural we should see signs that there are significant shifts of employment towards sectors where there are a few trained workers (those with skills newly in demand) shuffling through a large number of job offers, with an eye towards maximizing their return on their scarce skills. We should also be able to trace continuing price increases in those sectors to wage inflation in those sectors (that is wages in those sectors rising faster that other wages on average)
But we do not see those things either.
I saw some stats on this, but don’t remember where. It was a post on some econ blog debunking claims that some small observed regional cases of structural unemployment could be extrapolated to the whole economy. Problem was that either, the potential demand for the skill was quite small and regionally limited, or the prospective employers were only hiring at the current wage rates, which are lower overall than before the financial panic and recession and the low wage offer from employers explained most of the difficulty in filling the positions.
But that is another source of data to look for to settle the issue.
jg
with regard to “why are dems not fighting for us/where are their spines, et al” one obv consideration is they have ‘sold out to the moneyed class/Same as GOP, etc’.
But does anyone put stock into an idea of maybe large blocks of dems are being blackmailed with something? going back to the Clinton days maybe? Seemed dems in the 90’s had some balls but none do today…and it seems POTUS talks (campaigns) a great game but never quite backs it up when he has pulpit now. Of course msm accounts for sheeples perceptions, shifting realities, etc.
I’m an 48yo Obama supporter and was expecting a bit more “change” by now. so yeah, disappointed but still realistic and hopeful.
Is MSM being blackmailed too? MSM sold us the Warren Commission so it seems they can be compelled to do damn near anything.
Can greed be used as an ongoing blackmail? My parents had faith that my future will be in a secure and common-sense based country. I have achingly little faith my teenaged kids will be in a better country in 33 years. Unless they marry canadians and move.
Nick
@Ross Hershberger:
I agree, which is why they were the first to recover.
Stan
Who’s the firebagger now, John?
Just sayin’.
Hugs!
Chris
@slag: Besides what all the others have said, you can look at the situation from an “output only” (black box) point of view.
Right now, we have disinflation: declining inflation as measured over time, i.e., the second derivative is negative. [If we had steady inflation (say 2% per year unchanging) the 2nd derivative would be flat; if we had increasing inflation, the 2nd derivative would be positive.] Year-over-year inflation is now down around 1% (there are lots of different measures so it will depend on which one you use of course).
Now, during the Clinton years, we had unemployment drop below 5% while undergoing pretty much steady inflation (mild increases and decreases that over time more or less averaged out to a steady 3.5 percent or so per year). Let’s take this as a black-box-output point.
For macroeconomics purposes, then, we can look at the current unemployment rate (almost 10%) and observe inflation, and watch what happens over the next few years. Let’s say that, by some great miracle, unemployment drops to 7% by late Nov 2011, i.e., goes down significantly. (The precise number won’t matter as long as it’s above our “benchmark 5%”.)
At this time, to use the black box method of deciding what kind of unemployment we had back in 2010, we simply look at what has happened to inflation. There are three possibilities:
1. inflation has gone down even more
2. inflation has remained steady
3. inflation has increased
The black box says that the unemployment was “structural” if and only if we have case 3, an increase in inflation. We know that we can have steady inflation at a mere 5% unemployment (because we did under Clinton), but (we claim, here in the future) that we are seeing an increase in inflation due to not enough workers available for the jobs that businesses are trying to fill, making the businesses have to offer increases in wages that are resulting in general economy-wide price increases, etc.
In cases 1 and 2, by contrast, businesses are able to hire everyone they want without increasing wages and hence prices.
Of course, this is all too simple. As the old joke goes, weather forecasters argue over whether it will rain tomorrow, while economists argue over whether it rained yesterday. The economy has so many moving parts and so many ways to measure them that it’s tough to use any black (or even grey or white) box to make claims about it. Even something relatively simple like “inflation” is actually really complicated. If you’re buying groceries and paying rent, inflation is indeed going down right now. If you’re buying a college education, though, inflation is skyrocketing.
ruemara
@molosky:
While I, for one, thought his rant hit some very cogent points, I practically have to steam clean my brain due to the new information on who this person is. It’s as oily and distasteful as agreeing with Pat Buchanan.
@Ross Hershberger:
Here’s my question. WTF do ‘financial services’ companies do? How do they make anything or contribute anything to economy?
Nick
@jg:
or that many Democratic voters aren’t all that Democratic. There’s that too.
molosky
@ruemara:
This is exactly what I mean by being seduced.
Was it Kierkegaard or Rick James who said “populism is a hell of a drug”?
jrg
@Jill:
Cry me a fucking river. What do you think those of us who were born after 1970 have been paying into the system? Cheese Doodles?
MikeB
I feel compelled to chime in with Jill and M Bouffant regarding the
constant generational generalizations that appear regularly on this
blog. I was born in ’43, and I vividly remember the upheavals in the
60’s and the wide spread belief that by the time we were senior citizens,
and the old folks had all died off, war racism and poverty would be
distant memories. Obviously, some in our “generation” didn’t get the message and wrecked the country once in power.
But before you slam an entire generation, ask yourself: Are you sure there aren’t enough assholes in your generation to also wreck the country? I hope not, but…
Brachiator
@wmd:
Excellent observations. A NY Times article about the bailout makes the following observation:
Some of the machinations around the Irish bailout is not just about saving banks or bondholders, but about preserving the economic underpinnings of the European Union.
And Irish government officials and banks believed that joining the European Community would give them a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, this also landed them smack dab in the middle of the insane housing bubble and bank financial stupidity.
And so, the financial wizards fear that Spain might be the next domino to fall, and bailing out Spain, and maintaining the Euro, will be much more expensive than the Irish bailout.
But if these financial wizards don’t stop using taxpayers and sovereign nations to underwrite the financial games of the banksters, they will probably find that the costs will be far higher than they could ever have imagined.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@WyldPirate:
.
.
They already did, noting that everybody does it while nodding their heads at each other and clucking knowingly.
Also too, they weren’t surprised at all by the news. No, not at all. They have a rule about that.
.
.
jrg
@MikeB:
No question there are assholes in my generation (I’m gen X), but they’re not taking a significant portion of my paycheck to take care of their health care and living expenses, while large numbers of them lecture my gainfully employed ass about “Soc ialsim”.
This is not rocket science. Until there is fiscal sanity in this country, it’s a zero sum game between my generation and the boomers. Social Security and Medicare simply will not be there for me unless we balance the budget (over business cycles, not during massive slumps) by either raising taxes or cutting benefits.
Sly
Nigel Farage has been elevated to the status of broken clock, and not by his own doing. That Ireland, Greece, Portugal, etc are tied to the Euro isn’t the root problem. It’s that managing the Euro has become a fundamentally lop-sided affair, with the ECB being beholden to certain nations within the Eurozone at the expense of others.
This situation just happens to coincide with UKIP’s euroscepticism. The problem is that what they advocate, withdrawing from the Euro, would devastate these economies even more. And I seriously doubt that Farage cares one whit about any of that.
@WyldPirate:
Only if it was your kitten.
fasteddie9318
@Jill:
Nuts, you’re getting my parents and my wife in that age range (she’s a couple of years older than me), so I guess not…but, geez, you say we can whack all the rest of you along with them? I’ll really have to weigh the pros and cons on this one.
NR
@Uncle Clarence Thomas: Right, we all knew what we were getting with Obama.
Anybody who still believes this, go see Inside Job. In the film, candidate Obama is talking tough about the greed of Wall Street and the need for strong regulations. No reasonable person watching that speech would have predicted the appointments he made to every key economic position in his administration. To claim otherwise is simply bullshit.
JerseyJeffersonian
@NR:
I’m sorry, but no, it was possible to smell out the betrayals to come because there was a rather glaring example before everyone’s noses in the FISA vote. That was the one that did it for me. The man had, in assuming office as a United States Senator, sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution. And when, after promising that he would filibuster against the passage of this legislation that immunized telecommunications corporations against legal actions undertaken on – you guessed it – Constitutional grounds, and went and VOTED FOR the legislation, I knew just what I would be getting if he were to become President. And that would not be someone in whose word one could repose trust.
It is hard to have one’s hopes dashed, but the assessment must be made in the cold light of morning that at best President Obama has been demonstrated to be weak and ineffectual, if not actually mendacious. This is not the second coming of Abraham Lincoln, here. If anything, it’s more like the second coming of James Buchanan. And that ain’t good.
General Stuck
@JerseyJeffersonian:
James Buchanan didn’t pass HCR, and yes, I know, it was a sellout like everything else. Does it dawn on you folks that Obama is a politician that does politician things. Like as a POTUS candidate in the midst of an uphill election, especially with his skin pigment in this country, that maybe that yea vote, along with a lot of other dems, that didn’t make a bit of difference on whether the Fisa bill passed, may have helped him win the election. You act like there are heroes in politics. There are none, not Obama, not any. you want to hump someone over that vote, how about humping Reid and Pelosi for calling the goddamn vote when they didn’t have to.
MikeB
@jrg: Cutting the ridiculous defense budget in half would solve a lot of our fiscal
problems, and if I were to presume to lecture the younger generation about anything, I would advocate a lot more soc ialism for everyone, not less.
I myself am still gainfully employed like you. I need health insurance to protect my
seriously ill spouse who is 10 years my junior and not eligible for Medicare.
The social programs could be saved for your generation if our government
ever got it’s priorities straight. Like most Republicans, Frum sees
entitlement cuts as the only path to fiscal sanity. I recommend Taibbi’s
“Griftopia” as an eye opening view on the state of politics and
finance in America.
Nick
@JerseyJeffersonian:
It’s funny when you complain about Obama shitting all over the Constitution, you finish by saying he isn’t like a President who….shit all over the Constitution.
We need more history in schools.
Nick
@John Cole:
You know what I find interesting. A coworker of mine who voted for Nader in 2000 and 2004 and almost voted for McKinney in 2008 says we need to cut taxes on the rich.
I’ll give you three guesses what type of income her family takes in.
FlipYrWhig
@JerseyJeffersonian:
This is one of those sentences that cries out to be read in the voice of Dr. Smith from _Lost in Space_.
JerseyJeffersonian
General,
Yes, you are of course correct that politicians are often up to their tricks, and I make some allowances for this. But, at least for this citizen, when it comes down to the nitty gritty, I have the hope (vain, perhaps) that statesmanship and principled action should carry the day. Lyndon Johnson, certainly a vexed figure in American politics, did the right thing by pushing for the Civil Rights Act. He knew, and expressed at the time, that this was going to cost his party the South for in all likelihood a generation. By definition, this was bad politics; yet it was admirable statesmanship, and it was in aid of enforcing several amendments to the Constitution. Despite Johnson’s many flaws and errors of judgment, I think that this showed the man’s mettle in some fundamental sense.
With Barack Obama’s actions surrounding the FISA bill, I was fundamentally disenchanted. This involved profound issues concerning the 4th Amendment, and as a reputed Constitutional scholar, this should have been an occasion for leadership, not gamesmanship. Ceding ground without a fight (do we see a theme here…) at a historic juncture was not the act of a statesman. Forgive me, but in my opinion, the Republic is at an inflection point where having a statesman at the helm is truly needful. I looked for better, but did not see it. After 8 years of Bush the Lesser trampling the Constitution and the Bill of Rights underfoot, the nation was ready to be led out of the wilderness.
I guess we’ve got 32 more years to go.
JerseyJeffersonian
Nick,
Yes, it is true that Lincoln’s actions, particularly concerning habeas corpus, were irregular.
But let me remind you that I drew the comparison between Obama and Lincoln’s predecessor, Buchanan, whose weakness and vacillation in the face of provocation from the Southern Fire Eaters served only to embolden the regressive forces at large, and make the coming storm unavoidable. So some of Lincoln’s unenviable choices had been thrust upon him through the temporizing and trimming of Buchanan. We are afflicted by our own political bullies on the right today, and kowtowing in their direction only gives them reason to keep poking the administration in the chest to keep them backing up. Not a wise choice. Stand and fight for once or you’ll get really good at retrograde motion.
The Raven
John, Obama supporters, I continue to wish you leaders worthy of your loyalty, but I fear you are going to be waiting a while yet.
acontra
I happen to think that a Nancy Pelosi vs. Sarah Palin presidential debate would be incredibly awesome.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
John could put up a list of 500 positive acts obama has done, and there will always be people who say “so what”.
You can say Obama has ended combat operations in Iraq (the issue that dominated the decade) within 18 months like he promised and bloggers will say, “so what, that was easy”.
You can say Obama prevented a 2nd Great Depression, and bloggers will say, “so what, that was easy”.
You can say Obama passed HCR, an objective that has eluded a progressives for 110 years, and bloggers will say, “so what, that was easy”.
You can say within a month Obama will toss DADT into the trash heap of history, and bloggers will say “so what, that was easy”.
You can say within a month Obama will accomplish a landmark nuclear arms reduction treaty, and bloggers will say “so what…. RAHM!!!!!”.
And on, and on, and on.
Bloggers will never be objective. They’re too emotional. Their emotion overwhelms their cognitive abilities. They won’t account for accomplishments that doesn’t fit their narrative — their warped, anger ridden adaptation of reality.
And to top it off, they project bias on to others.
Heh!
JenJen
@freelancer: Dude! I am so gripped by “Griftopia” that I can barely get outraged about privatizing the TSA anymore.
I firmly believe I am Balloon-Juice’s longest-document Taibbi fangirl, to the point of sexual musings, and I think even Cole would back up my affirmation here, but really, Taibbi’s just outdone himself. I can’t put the book down. And reading it is making me more bullish on guillotines than ever.
MikeB
@JenJen: Per my comment #118,
I heartily agree, I literally read Griftopia in one sitting, blowing off
a bunch of errands I had to do that day. It really changes your
perspective, and confirms Howard Zinn’s theory in “People’s
History of the United States” that the primary purpose of the US government is to protect the interests of the moneyed classes
at home and abroad. (And always has been.)
Robert Sneddon
The Euro was not put in place only for economic reasons, it was implemented to further weld together the disparate and often-warring states of Europe. If the Eurozone breaks up we can look back in history to another time and place when disparate states under economic pressure from their neighbours decided to decouple their economies and their currencies. The result was the American Civil War.
A few years back a landmark was reached in Europe but not much commented on at the time — the record for the longest period in recorded history between armies crossing the Rhine to invade and conquer was broken. That record stood at sixty years. We really don’t want that clock to be reset.
Ross Hershberger
@ruemara:
Sorry for the late reply. I turn into a pumpkin at midnight.
Loaded question. We do need them so we can earn interest on savings, borrow for homes and college and use debit cards instead of checks and cash. But shit like payday loans and wild speculation in derivatives is madness.
Menzies
@JenJen:
Count me in. I’m a huge Taibbi fanboy – discovered him a year and a half ago or so, I think that piece he did for RS on McCain, and haven’t put him down since.
Griftopia‘s a hell of a book. I read it rather voraciously, and I’ll probably have to read it again to remember what everything means. But I will enjoy every second of it, I promise you that much.
General Stuck
@The Raven:
The non zero sum nature of the beast with the alternative to any dem presnit being a member of the GOP presnt, in these pre peak wingnut crazy days, fill in quite nicely whatever shortcomings obama has, and there certainly are those, as there would be with any dem potus. I am loyal to keeping Sarah Palin away from the Oval Office, sosueme.
Barney
Just to re-emphasise the truly non-serious nature of UKIP: Lord Monckton, climate change denier extraordinaire, is their joint deputy leader. He appeared before a House committee on energy as a performing seal for the Republicans this year.