Even the liberal Atrios thinks today’s job report is “decent news”.
It’s pretty clear the markets are responding to the clarity of House Republicans’ policy goals.
Job news
by DougJ| 126 Comments
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Job news
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Just Some Fuckhead
Maybe the Confidence Fairy is finally pleased. *cross fingers*
General Stuck
The wingnuts will soon call for bombing the Chicken Coop.
cleek
sadly, you’re months late in reaching this conclusion.
fmbjo
If Atrios hadn’t given that link to CR I would have thought this an April Fools’ joke.
Just J
It is good news… even though I lost my job last week. Hell, the unemployment in my county is only 6.6%… of course in my very rural county, that means 1,300 people are out of work. That’s not that many.
ppcli
I knew passing that “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Bill” bill would pay off.
daveNYC
Meh, it’s decent in the sense that it’s not skull-fuckingly bad. 219k doesn’t even keep up with population growth, we need hella more job creation, and I assume that those jobs will come in the form of state and federal uterus cops.
PeakVT
@daveNYC: 219k is above the ~130-150k needed to keep up with population growth.
arguingwithsignposts
Wait until the next round of public employee layoffs comes.
Just Some Fuckhead
@daveNYC:
It all depends on what the Competitiveness In Breeding Council recommends. Hopefully chairman Randall Terry will release his group’s findings soon.
Bobby Thomson
Style infraction. I don’t think Atrios qualifies as “Even the liberal.” That sort of thing is reserved for such even-the-liberals as Richard Cohen, the New Republic, and Mickey Kaus.
arguingwithsignposts
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I saw what you did there.
Just Some Fuckhead
@arguingwithsignposts:
That was pretty fucking awesome, huh?
danimal
Attention: Legislative pages and visitors may wish to avert their eyes and cover their ears!
@daveNYC:
I’ve finally found the silver lining in all the state and local cutbacks (necessary to cover for corporate tax cuts).
We can’t afford the uterus cops.
JCT
We laugh, but the nitwit Republicans will soon trumpet this as their “success” and after it dies when they whack spending they will say it’s the Democrat’s fault because they didn’t get all the cuts they wanted.
And the MSM will facilitate this.
PurpleGirl
@PeakVT: Above it, yes; but barely. At this rate it will take years to get all the unemployed back to work, along with the new people entering the job market.
New Yorker
1,656,000 private sector jobs created in the last year, 395,000 government jobs lost…..and yet teabagging lunatics will still be yelling “sociamulism” about the president.
It’s really frightening that we have to deal with a large chunk of the country that exists in an alternate reality. Negotiating with the GOP is like negotiating with Kim Jong-Il at this point.
PurpleGirl
@PurpleGirl: ETA: And what kind of salary and benefits are those jobs offering/paying?
(I was told I didn’t have rights to edit my comment!)
catclub
@danimal:Unionize the Uterus cops!
More splodin’ heads for the wingers.
Fox news can’t decide which it wants more: to bash Obama or to bomb the Middle east.
jwb
@arguingwithsignposts: That’s not long off. Texas alone is looking at massive layoffs among teachers. We’re only starting to get a close look at what’s planned for the rest of the government.
cleek
@PurpleGirl:
show us in the Constitution where this so-called “right” is listed !
Bob Loblaw
It’s a good report. 2-3 million jobs a year is about what you’d expect from an economy that’s got its shit together, and this would do that.
Now it’s just a matter of letting the sustained recovery do its job, and wait out however long it takes to reabsorb the un and underemployed. Probably 3+ more years, and we’ll never see >5% full employment again. Oh well.
Geek, Esq.
If the economy keeps on improving, what will the GOP run on in 2012?
danimal
@New Yorker:
…And a meme is born.
@catclub: I luvs me some winger splodin heads in the mornin!
FlipYrWhig
@Geek, Esq.: Just a hunch, but probably the need to beat down the shadowy foreigners and lazy moochers intent on taking your stuff.
New Yorker
@Geek, Esq.:
What they’re going to run on now: the fact that the president is a Muslim atheist Kenyan who hates freedom and represents a bigger threat to America than the Soviet Union was.
It will be enjoyable to watch the GOP candidate get blown out in 2012 in ways that make Mondale’s 1984 performance look competitive.
danimal
@Geek, Esq.:
Good lord, have you been asleep? There’s a Kenyan, soshalist, neo-Nazi, commie-loving, peacenik warmonger in the office. They’ll find something to run on.
PurpleGirl
@Bob Loblaw: Some of us can’t wait 3+ years… some of us have no income/money now and there are no social programs to help us.
New Yorker
@danimal:
You forgot radical Muslim atheist.
daveNYC
@PeakVT: Eh, my memory had gastritis. Still, with 8.8% unemployment, we need crazy strong job growth.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Clearly the Galtian overlords were not hiring due to concerns of out of control uteri. The GOP’s priorities helped clear that up and have spurred job creation.
IM
@Bobby Thomson:
It is a subversion of the trope.
Dougal McGuire
So we’ll be back to where we were before the crash by the time I can retire. Great.
Dexter
@Geek, Esq.:
Looks like you finally left DKos.
PeakVT
@PurpleGirl: No doubt. 220K was the average for the entire Clinton administration, when the population was 35-45 million less. And he didn’t start more or less at the bottom of the business cycle.
Dougal McGuire
@Bob Loblaw:
we’ll never see >5% full employment again
Don’t you think someone should do something about that?
arguingwithsignposts
@Bob Loblaw:
That is among the stupidest things I’ve read on this board in a long time. Not to be all debbie downer here, but those 200K+ jobs are a drop in the bucket with people who are losing unemployment benefits, new layoffs in state and local gov’ts around the country, plus potential new economic troubles in Europe, plus Fukushima and the Japanese clusterfuck, plus high gas prices. Do I need to keep going?
Keep whistling past the graveyard, bob. Our economy is 75 percent consumer spending. guess what happens when all that spending gets sucked up with gasoline, or they don’t have anything to spend?
ETA: Is that 8.8 percent not counting those who have given up looking?
PurpleGirl
From the Washington Post?Bloomberg Business article on the new employment numbers:
Does anyone here know how they would calculate the numbers of us “not looking for work”? If we start looking again, how will they know we are even doing that since we don’t get benefits of any sort? No one keeps track of those not getting UI benefits. (And, dear friends, not every state got 99 weeks of benefits; it depended on your statewide unemployment number staying above a magic 8.5%.
Bob Loblaw
@Dougal McGuire:
Probably. But they won’t. The choice was made to write off an entire generation of non-college educated workers rather than address structural imbalances. What are you gonna do?
And as for the rest of you, I’m sorry to break up your doomer parade but things are back to their mediocre old selves, instead of apocalyptic destruction. Things are slowly getting better.
And people accuse me of being irrationally knee-jerk anti-Obama…
Bob Loblaw
@arguingwithsignposts:
Nope. They become unpersons, lost to the netherworld.
Cris
Are there no prisons? And the Union workhouses?
PurpleGirl
@Cris: DIAF
ETA: If you meant that to be sarcasm or funny — it isn’t. I’m serious. And the situation of many people is desperate.
Bob L
GOP theists is proved; they got elected, did nothing and things got better.
Cris
As it was when Dickens wrote those lines.
OzoneR
@Bob Loblaw:
Except for when all the men were at war, I don’t think we saw “full unemployment” again after the Great Depression until like the mid 1950s.
arguingwithsignposts
@PurpleGirl:
As it was when the blues musician wrote “laughing to keep from crying.”
mclaren
Paul Krugman op-ed: “The Mellon Doctrine”
Since this debate was definitively settled 80 years ago and the Mellon-Republican doctrine of cutting deficits to cure a depression has been conclusively disproven (and I learned this during junior high school as part of basic economics and elementary social studies), it stands to reason that this long-debunked fallacy of cutting deficits in the face of a massive economic downtown must become official government policy today.
Since America is now moving backwards at an accelerating rate and losing basic knowledge in important areas, we can expect ignorance to spread to other disciplines. Thus I look forward to seeing the doctrine of life spontaneously arising from dead matter taught in university biology departments next, followed by geocentric astronomy, phlogiston chemistry, and perpetual motion machines as new sources of energy to comabt Peak Oil. In physics, America will soon lobby CERN to shut down in order to concentrate on Aristotle’s four basic elements of air, earth, water and fire as the constituents of all matter.
Meanwhile:
Chart of the day: U.S. financial profits, Felix Salmon blog.
The one part of this that spells good news? When the economy crashes the next time, the crash will be so huge that there won’t be enough money on the planet to bail out the bankrupt banks. So capitalism will end once and for all. Something new will have to take its place, because the global financial system will be so hopelessly broken no one will be able to put it back together again.
cleek
@PurpleGirl:
the BLS does a monthly household survey. they ask if you are employed, looking, not looking, “discouraged”, etc..
Gravenstone
@PurpleGirl:The ghost of Charles Dickens asks that you kindly have your Snark-O-Meter checked.
PurpleGirl
@cleek: Thank you for the link. If you read the whole report, I think the numbers still don’t look good. (But then, maybe that’s because I’m still unemployed.)
Midnight Marauder
@Geek, Esq.:
Oh man, this was just too good.
“Okay. The economy has improved dramatically now. We’ve lost our biggest ace in the hole. How do we win the White House in 2012 now?”
“…Isn’t that black guy still in there?”
“Ah, yes. Indeed he is. [pause] Well, that was much easier than I anticipated! Who wants to go to Subway for lunch? Chips and drinks on me, gang!”
Cris
@PurpleGirl: A friend of mine often says “The trouble with statistics is that when it’s happening to you, it’s 100%.”
agrippa
The Mellon Doctrine is alive and well. It appears to be immortal.
It is one of the key elements of GOP dogma.
Unfortunately, those who have good ideas about getting a real recovery going are considered well meaning crackpots.
We all know that the New Deal was a failure. Anyone who is well informed knows that WW2 got us out of the depression.
Bruce S
Movement in the right direction is good news – but these numbers are still staggering after this long…
Also, 25% of homeowners are underwater.
Just saying.
cleek
@agrippa:
Thornton Melon ?
cleek
@Bruce S:
i just spoke with Japan. they think it’s time for a new metaphor.
HRA
“People who stopped looking for work during the downturn are not counted as unemployed. If many out-of-work people start looking for work again, they will be counted and the unemployment rate could go up. That could happen even if the economy is adding jobs.”
Definitely not true. It would be highly impossible to count the unemployed not getting UI.
joe from Lowell
I never knew abortion restrictions were so good for job growth.
Turgidson
@Geek, Esq.:
The economy. Which they’ll claim to have saved from tyrannical Kenyan sockulism.
cmorenc
@jwb:
To GOP ideologues, this is an intentional double-feature, not a bug. In addition to cutting government spending to make corporate and upper-income tax cuts more affordable, a great many GOP ideologues actually want to wreck the public school system and public confidence therein sufficiently to facilitate its replacement in substantial part with private academies (subsidized with public funding through tuition credits, grants, etc). Ideally in their scheme, only a residual public school system would in the end remain to serve mainly the underclass they don’t really want despoiling their private academies.
cleek
@HRA:
the BLS survey asks if you are getting UI or not, along with your employment status and your job-seeking status.
Just Some Fuckhead
@cleek:
The housing sector is experiencing a meltdown?
HRA
@cleek:
Thanks. I did not know about BLS.
cmorenc
@Bruce S:
True, but to extend the metaphor, a substantial portion of those homeowners bought their houses on financial floodplains, so to speak, rather than making a more prudent choice for their financial situation and risk tolerance.
Lol
This just proves Obama is a right-wing failure for not bringing us back to 400k/month job growth as soon as he took office.
joe from Lowell
As far as “but this doesn’t measure this or that,” try this table.
U5, U6, pick your poison. You want to talk about “marginally attached,” you want to talk about “discouraged workers,” pick your poison.
The fact is, we’re seeing significantly good news across the board. Unless you’re Mclaren, whining because there just aren’t enough people hurting for his idiotic Marxist “worse is better” fantasies.
BTW, the “200,000 just to keep up with job growth” is an approximation that was based on the immigration rates we had during the last couple of expansions. Immigration slowed down considerably during the Great Recession.
taylormattd
@Dexter: No, he’s still there occasionally arguing with psychopaths.
cleek
@Just Some Fuckhead:
it’s still on shaky ground.
(-25 karma pts)
joe from Lowell
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Florida, Vegas, and the Inland Empire real estate is still radioactive?
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@PurpleGirl:
This:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/economy/01jobs.html?_r=1&hp
Bottom line: sucky, low-paying, indentured servitude jobs.
It’s all part of our Galtian Overlords’s Plan to gut the middle class even more. Yeah, you have a job but you can’t afford shit.
matryoshka
As always with jobs reports, I wonder if the jobs created are mostly full-time jobs with benefits, or service-worker, part-time jobs with none? Does anyone know?
ETA: Just saw comradescott’s link. Will read.
Just Some Fuckhead
@joe from Lowell:
A tsunami of bad mortgages has swept over the US.
joe from Lowell
@Bruce S:
Indeed, and the construction sector, which usually leads our economy out of recession, is still losing jobs. As is government…and yet, we’re seeing these job numbers anyway.
Imagine what’s going to happen when inflation gets back to normal and brings housing prices with it, so that those homes can start selling.
And when local and state revenues start coming in higher than expected.
joe from Lowell
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
Those are the jobs that were lost. Did you ever see the splits on job losses by income or by education during the recession?
arguingwithsignposts
@joe from Lowell:
At least in this respect, I’m sorta with mclaren (although not all Mad Max Thunderdome): 200K is a drop in a bucket. Unemployment among the youngest workers is still scary high, and the “entitlement squeeze” coupled with age-based discrimination means this is only good news like having droplets instead of a torrential downpour is good news during a hurricane.
200,000 is meant to keep up with *population* growth, and that includes more than immigration – also birth rates.
While all jobs added are “good news” in the respect that more people are working, there’s a long way to go, and it looks like we’re going to see a bunch of chin-stroking from the political elites. And again, nobody’s talking about the next round of public employee layoffs that are going to come.
joe from Lowell
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Yeah, and there are still a ton of houses that have to be cleared in the hardest-hit areas.
Just Some Fuckhead
@arguingwithsignposts:
We don’t have to worry about those folks for another 15 years.
Paul in KY
@cleek: Is he up to -746 karma points now?
I’ve been trying to keep score, but he’s hard to keep up with.
PeakVT
@joe from Lowell: Those areas were devastated by neutron loans.
OzoneR
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
this problem predates the recession
Just Some Fuckhead
@joe from Lowell: Some of these areas look like they’ve been evacuated.
arguingwithsignposts
@Just Some Fuckhead:
sorry, i meant graduation rates – workers entering the economy, which isn’t all immigration. not to mention that many immigrants don’t have “official” jobs to begin with.
OzoneR
@arguingwithsignposts:
that changes by number of immigrants an new job seekers…since the recession, immigration is down and many are staying in school, so the 200,000 number is probably a lot less.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@joe from Lowell:
I have two friends who would beg to differ on “those were the jobs lost”.
One was a QA software tester making 50K a year. Got laid off in Nov 2008. He still doesn’t have full time work. He does some photo interpretation for some company that monitors oil storage tanks. He just recently began working, again part time, for a startup that does open source database support work. Last month was the first month for him in over 2 years that he barely broke even, ie., didn’t raid his IRA or 401Ks. Still no benefits and nowhere close to 50K a year he was making before He’ll now hafta work until he dies.
So yeah, he’s bounced back real good.
Another friend was a chemist for an aluminum plant. Okay, he’s not a friend, he’s the husband of a friend, a real shmuck. He too was laid off 2 years ago from his 60K a year job. He’s had two part time jobs since, one was actually working a line in a pharmaceutical plant. Of course he’s a rockrib Repup who voted for the assholes that have helped keep him unemployed so I weep not for him. But both jobs he had, even if the one had developed into full time work, would have paid about 38K a year. That’s a guy with a BS in Chemical Engineering.
So, there’s been a massive reset button pressed on salaries in this country and it ain’t coming back soon.
Just Some Fuckhead
@OzoneR: So have you settled on OzoneR, then? Any other sockpuppets we should be aware of or do you want us to figure them out?
Phil65
@joe from Lowell:
The other interesting thing that I don’t hear many people mentioning is that starting right now, and continuing for the rest of the decade, more than 40 million Baby Boomers will reach retirement age. That’s an average of about ten thousand a day, in case anyone’s wondering. Even accounting for immigration and the birth rate, the labor force participation rate is already beginning to drop, and it will start to plummet in the coming years. Contrary to the fantasies of some, it is not all due to discouraged workers. In fact, most of it is not. That ain’t a theory, that’s demographics.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@OzoneR:
Yes it does and it also is deja vu all over again. Everybody likes to talk about the great Clinton years but I remember a comedian doing a bit about Clinton’s claim of creating a shitload of jobs. The comic would say “and I’ve got 5 of them” meaning that in order to make a living, one had to, well, take the kind of jobs we’re looking at this time around.
The big difference between then and now is how the collapse of the housing market (which was bubblized anyway) has tied many people down, thus, they don’t even have the marginal option of moving somewhere to take a semi-decent job.
joe from Lowell
@arguingwithsignposts:
200,000+ once is a drop in the bucket. As somebody mentioned earlier, these numbers are roughly what we were seeing during the longest peacetime expansion in American history, the Clinton years.
Oh, certainly. We’re not “there,” terms of where we want unemployment to be. 8.8% is still too high. The point is, it’s dropping at a significant rate. We’re “getting there.”
Um, no, not birth rates. Newborns don’t enter the labor force. The 200,000 number was what it took too keep up with working-age population growth, caused both by immigration of working-age people and native-born people entering their working years – and as I said, with the lower rates of immigration, that number has dropped.
Thank God, the Republicans didn’t take over the House until we were already far enough out of the recession (measured by GDP) that private-sector economic growth and even job growth have been going on long enough to gain enough momentum on their own that the recovery no longer depends on stimulus packages. Because we ain’t getting one.
If you look closely at the report, you’ll see that the economy put up these numbers even though government employment shrank by thousands. Total private-sector job growth was up in the 240,000 range.
arguingwithsignposts
@OzoneR:
Why is this a good thing?
Can't Be Bothered
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
And anecdotes do absolutely nothing to disprove aggregate data. Everyone has been hit, but the poor and uneducated were hit the hardest. However, what you say about salaries is the real tragedy. The assholes at the top want scared underlings they can squeeze the blood out of so that they might be able to add a few more feet to that yacht they’ve been wanting.
joe from Lowell
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
Wow, two? Gee, I wonder if I can find two whole people who got jobs that weren’t “shitty, low-wage, indentured servitude jobs?”
There have actually been studies of this, about the nature of job losses in the aggregate, and they bear me out. Job losses were much, much worse as you move down the income scale. Don’t you remember all of those posts on liberal blogs, including this one IIRC, in 2009-2010, talking about how “there is no recession for the elites,” and that’s why there wasn’t enough urgency about stimulus? I’m pretty sure Krugman wrote about it.
arguingwithsignposts
@joe from Lowell:
hahahaha. Give us three more months of $4 gasoline prices and let’s talk again.
joe from Lowell
@arguingwithsignposts:
Because it means that, contra some people’s impressions, there really are enough jobs being created to reduce unemployment.
arguingwithsignposts
@joe from Lowell:
And again I ask, why is this a good thing?
joe from Lowell
@arguingwithsignposts:
Nice forced-laughter thingie.
So, you’re done pretending that this isn’t good news, and have moved onto assuring us from on high that the good news won’t last?
OK.
joe from Lowell
@arguingwithsignposts:
Try to follow the conversation yourself. Look at the comment I was responding to.
I’m not going to play the “You can’t make me say it” game with you.
arguingwithsignposts
@joe from Lowell:
FFS, JfL – I need to give you my nym, because you really are intent on arguing that the sky is green. Kids don’t stay in school to get more education, but to avoid entering the job market when it sucks ass, and you’re telling me that this is evidence that enough jobs are being created to meet real demand?
arguingwithsignposts
@joe from Lowell:
In the sense that “the patient isn’t requiring two pints of blood a day to remain stable, just one” yes, it’s “good” news. Read my earlier comments, dumbass.
joe from Lowell
Whatever, man
It really is like arguing with a sign post.
arguingwithsignposts
@joe from Lowell:
says mr. 1-against-everyone-on-libya-in-every-thread.
PeakVT
Here is a graph of the YoY change in workforce between 1994 and early 2009. The trend line is about 1% (I don’t feel like digging out the exact percent out of my archives). The workforce is currently about 153M according to the BLS. 1.1% YoY growth of 153M jobs works out to about 140k monthly.
joe from Lowell
You never even looked at the job report before you decided what you were going to decide it meant.
The patient doesn’t require blood at all. The patient is recovering nicely.
Wait, what was that word? Recovery? You mean, when somebody is getting better, healing, but hasn’t yet reached full health?
Why, what a horrible thing! That means that the patient is actually getting worse! Or not getting better. Or something.
All I know is that I’m going to cut myself now. Black is what I wear on the outside, because black is how I feel on the inside.
Can't Be Bothered
@arguingwithsignposts:
ummm… he didn’t say it was good or bad. It’s just a fact. What am I missing? Some people are addicted to being contrary, gloomy and outraged. Yes, it blows that we could be up around 300k/month if we had some relatively small stimulus for states, but thems the breaks when our nation is by and large composed of tantruming two year olds with the memory span of gold fish. Gas could hurt, we’ll see. That’s not really my worry. My real worry is that our overlords like scared little peasants, so they’ll continue to refuse to hire and sit on their record profits. At least we’re on pace for 2+ million jobs this year. That is a good thing and remarkable given the confluence of bullshit and psychopaths we’ve got roaming about.
arguingwithsignposts
@joe from Lowell:
I looked at the report. It’s anemic. WTF am I supposed to say. Oh, joy! We’re at only 8.8 percent “official” unemployment rate. This is good news for John McCain!
Your razor blade is calling, joe.
Bob Loblaw
Nobody goes out of their way to make these threads all about themselves quite like joe from Lowell…
joe from Lowell
@arguingwithsignposts:
You haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about, and your comments make that profoundly clear to anyone who does.
Thank you for sharing your feelings.
OzoneR
@Just Some Fuckhead: Dude, WTF are you talking about? Did you mean to say this to someone else?
joe from Lowell
@Bob Loblaw: Bob, once you wrote this comment, you have written more comments about me on this thread than I did.
Joining “arguing with sign posts,” who decided it was vitally important to remind everyone who’s reading our exchange that I hold the less-popular position on LIbya.
OzoneR
@arguingwithsignposts:
It’s really not that anemic. 200,000 jobs, U6 dropping .2%, it’s not anemic at all, unless you’re comparing it to a job report in 1997.
arguingwithsignposts
@joe from Lowell:
When someone like that comments on this thread, I’ll listen to them. Now, tell me all about your humanitarian efforts in Libya.
joe from Lowell
Job growth 50% higher than workforce growth is ‘anemic.’
Job growth comparable to that during the Clinton administration is ‘anemic.’
OK.
OzoneR
@arguingwithsignposts:
When my grandmother suffered a severe stroke, our family threw a party when she was able to speak in complete sentences. No one sat around and said “Well, she isn’t doing the jitterburg, so why is everyone so excited?”
Perspective is important.
joe from Lowell
I love the Talking Heads.
You start a conversation you can’t even finish. You’re talking a lot but you’re not saying aything. When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed. Say something once, why say it again?
arguingwithsignposts
@OzoneR:
Here’s a topline summary from the report:
TheF79
@Bob Loblaw:
In joe’s defense, his reading of the jobs report (good but not great, long way to go) is substantially sharper than those arguing contra.
OzoneR
@arguingwithsignposts: yeah, and? With so many people having dropped out of the workforce, it indicates that they’re coming back AND people are getting jobs. That’s a good thing as compared to the last two years.
arguingwithsignposts
@OzoneR:
When you’re dealing with one person, that kind of perspective is important. I agree. But we’re not talking about one person, and this is one of the things that always pisses me off when we start talking about “aggregate” good news on the labor front. There are millions of people – including some on this board – who are *not* better, who are not feeling the “good news” of those jobs added, who’ve taken huge pay cuts, decimated their savings and retirement, etc. who are still unemployed, losing UI benefits, etc. And it’s going to take (according to the GOS article yesterday) approx. 36 mos. to even approach what we were at before the class. So pardon me for not throwing a party when we’re still facing another round of public employee layoffs, high gas prices, Fuckedupshima, another situation in the middle east, and a bat-shit insane house and governors all over the country.
/emo rant
joe from Lowell
U3, total unemployed, dropped by 0.1 percentage point in a month.
However, U6, a much better measures of the amount of duck-fuckery in the economy, dropped by twice that.
U3 is now down 1.4 percentage points from last March.
U6 is down 1.8 in the past year.
OzoneR
@arguingwithsignposts:
There were millions of people whose lives weren’t better in the 1990s too. Hell, there were millions of people, my family included, who were worse off in 1940 than in 1930, that doesn’t mean the New Deal was a failure.
The problem is as a progressive, you’re never going to be happy, not because you’re a negative person, because as a progressive, you’re always going to look at what needs to be fixed, at what’s wrong versus what’s right. The day you think everything is perfect, you’re no longer a progressive…but you need to not look just at what’s wrong and also take into account what’s been fixed or is being fixed. If the report showed 300,000 jobs created, you’d want to know what could’ve been done to make it 500,000. If the jobs were paying good salaries, you’d want to know what we did wrong to not make them even better. That’s what progressives do.
This is about the employment report, not gas prices, not a nuclear power plant in Japan, not Libya, not Scott Walker and John Kasich, who, btw, are in office in part because there are a subset of people who won’t vote unless a candidate brings them to orgasm. This is about March’s employment numbers, and they’re good, they’re better than February’s, they’re better than March 2010 and March 2009, and I didn’t go back that far, but likely better than March 2008 too, and that is something to celebrate
But if you’re going to always preface good news with noting everything that’s wrong, you, as a progressive, are going to have a very long miserable life.
joe from Lowell
trend (trnd)
n.
1. The general direction in which something tends to move.
2. A general tendency or inclination. See Synonyms at tendency.
3. Current style; vogue: the latest trend in fashion.
intr.v. trend·ed, trend·ing, trends
1. To extend, incline, or veer in a specified direction: The prevailing wind trends east-northeast.
2. To show a general tendency; tend: “The gender gap was trending down”
trend
Wolfdaughter
@agrippa:
I believe you’re being snarky. But for the cognitive impaired (conservatives and glibertarians) spending on war is the ULTIMATE in New Deal spending. It’s government jobs squared, cubed, etc. War doesn’t “produce” anything. It destroys shit. (And people, but who cares if they’re the ENEMY?
Wolfdaughter
@Phil65:
You can’t go just by age. I’m a Boomer and am fortunate to do well enough with a combo of pension + SS, but most of my friends, Boomers also, most with jobs they could support themselves on, are looking at working well into their 70s. The criminal irresponsibility of Wall Street has gutted their pensions, IRAs, etc., and interest paid on various plans and accounts is still almost uncalculably low.
So I think if the 10,000 is calculated on birthdays, it’s high. Still represents a problem, though.
Just one more thing–we may be living longer than our parents (although we really don’t know that yet) but you can still have significant health problems which put many jobs out of reach. I have a bad back (already one major surgery). The average McJob for seniors, like being a greeter at Walmart, is totally out of the question for me. I can stand at the most perhaps 10 minutes at a time. And I’m hardly unique.
Wolfdaughter
@OzoneR:
I agree with your post, except why are you saying that all progressives look at any sign of improvement with jaundiced and unbelieving eyes? Unlike Arguing…I, as a progressive, can recognize that we’re moving in the right direction with jobs created, while also realizing that we’re not exactly climbing toward a huge boom period, in all likelihood.
Of course, very few of us are looking at the REAL elephant in the room. Which is, capitalism based upon an ever-increasing population base consuming ever-increasing amounts of non-renewable resources (further compromised by global climate change) cannot continue indefinitely, or even too much longer. I don’t know what to do about that, but it IS the biggest problem and humanity IS at a crossroads.
OzoneR
@Wolfdaughter:
No, I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t think they see any signs of improvement that way. I think they push aside good news because it the primary concern, the primary concern of a progressive is fixing the bad.
Just Some Fuckhead
@joe from Lowell:
Completely agree. In the 5 or more years I’ve been here, I’ve never made the same joke twice.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Bob Loblaw:
I’m trying.