Time for more tax cuts, I guess.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.
We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.
I was promised a recession.
🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵
Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?
Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard
Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.
The GOP is a fucking disgrace.
Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?
Good lord, these people are nuts.
Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.
A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.
When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.
Technically true, but collectively nonsense
Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.
It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.
The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.
It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.
Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.
The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.
Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.
Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.
The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.
“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”
danielx
And austerity too, don’t forget the austerity. Starvation and doing without medical care builds character.
General Stuck
Tastes Great!!
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
Tax Cuts are to Republicans as Robitussin was to Chris Rock’s Family.
General Stuck
@danielx:
I heard on ChuckEE this morn, where Obama said if it weren’t for all the cutbacks in government jobs at the state level, the UE rate would be a point lower. So they did some math, and discovered that 11 red states with big wins in the 2010 election, were responsible for like 60 percent of all lost state govment jobs cut from their draconian austerity bullshit to shrink big G down to bathtub size.
And those losses of red state gov jobs would have lowered the current UE rate, by 2 full points. Imagine that, and those states are still not hiring private sector jobs any different than all the other states.
Satanicpanic
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: Just put some tax cuts on it
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Actually, the right tax cuts would help, as some form of stimulus. The problem is one, we wouldn’t do the right tax cuts, and two, the Republicans are only screaming for tax cuts to theoretically shrink government, but they can’t even shrink government correctly.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Cutting benefits to the poor and elderly should knock at least a point off the unemployment rate.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Also, our answer from now on should be: Let’s do what Reagan did, raise taxes and increase government spending.
danielx
@General Stuck:
Yup. And naturally the results of all the austerity bullshit in Europe, well, that only happened because those countries harbor a bunch of soshulists. That would never happen here, because…because shut up, that’s why.
liberal
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Yes, but IMHO even the right tax cuts would be quite a bit less effective than more guvmint spending (in the short run).
deep
YES! More tax cuts! So my employer will another reason to not give me any raises for the next 10 years!
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@liberal:
But of course, the Republican base believes that taxes are THE HIGHEST IN THE HISTORY OF EVER!!!!!! Despite…you know, being the lowest ever in generations.
Jeff Spender
Let the spin begin!
Personally, as long as the economy is not losing jobs I’m pretty OK. It’s not as good as we’d like it to be, but let’s face it: with our current government it could be much worse.
To bad I’m a cynical misanthrope because I’d really like to find the positives instead of focusing on how terrible humanity must be to allow shit like this to continue.
liberal
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Heh. What would really be nice would be to equalize treatment of wage income, dividend income, capital gains, etc.
1986, baby!
gene108
@General Stuck:
Government jobs aren’t “real” jobs. They exist by stealing money from productive people, who could create more jobs, if the government wasn’t in the way.
QED fewer government jobs means more private sector jobs.
I really give up with this political/media culture. There’s no way to get the country charged up enough to prevent the right-wingers from slowly killing us off.
You’d think a call to keep teachers, cops and firefighters employed would’ve gotten people energized for some government spending to save those jobs…but I guess not…
liberal
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
I think they’re really low, but just a periodic reminder (not that you personally need it): the marginal rates and brackets themselves aren’t all that informative w/o substantial information about what’s taxable income, how different types of income are treated, etc.
The favored treatment of capital gains ain’t exactly new.
Waynski
Let’s not clutch our pearls and head to the fainting couch just yet. Last August we had a jobs report that said there were no jobs, zero, created in August. That was later revised upward to 100,000 created. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this number revised upward also.
My guess is Obama has told his folks at labor to err on the side of caution with respect to jobs numbers and that he’d rather revise upward later than downward. Can you imagine the batshit blowup from the right if Obama had a downward employment number revision? “That shifty, President Blackity McBlackman is cooking the books!”
Better to have them scream for a few news cycles that this proves the President is a failure and look stupid when the number is revised up. I’m just speculating and could be wrong, but I’m not freaking out about the number just yet.
redshirt
So, in a rare event, I read the actual news first and the jobs report was reported in a positive fashion; I came here to find out it was not good.
Things usually work the other way!
RalfW
Initial jobs reports are almost always revised in following months. The whole exercise is a bit of a circus.
Retail sales were strong last month. Target announced same-store sales were up 7.5%, total sales up 8%. Several other big retailers are up. There is a lag from increased sales to hiring.
Sure, Fox and Mittens will have a field day today and on the Sunday GOP talking head shows (oh, wait, it’ll be 10% “democrats” for, uhhhh, balance).
Meanwhile, go on the offensive. Find a private equity firm that laid off people last month 9can’t be that hard to find!) and savage them daily and tie them to Mitt. Don’t dance to the winger tune.
Hill Dweller
They can’t even get a transportation bill through the House. Historically, transportation bills have been funded for 6 years, and sailed through congress. Now, a 2 year deal is impossible, despite a desperate need for infrastructure improvements.
Obama needs to get out front and start demanding more action from Congress on the economy again.
John S.
Right on cue, let the nth flame war between the optimists and the pessimists begin!
PaulW
I swear to Dog I’ll pistol whip the next guy who says
shenaniganstax cuts.liberal
@gene108:
With an exception noted for civilian or military DOD jobs. Though we absolutely need to contract out as many as those as possible, too.
askew
Unfortunately, with the Republican House refusing to pass an actual transportation bill, instead of these tiny extensions, I expect the jobs #s to start coming down fast through the summer. A lot of road construction projects won’t be funded which will leave a lot of construction workers unemployed.
Also, the retail #s in today’s report were hideous.
Lastly, it’s irritating to read DK when jobs numbers are released. If the #s are good, the comments are full of posters reaching for bad news or conspiracy theories. If the #s are bad, they are chortling. It’s like freaking Red State in those #s.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@deep:
__
Yes, but compared with the industry standard practice of selling your children into slavery, harvesting your organs to sell on the black market, and grinding the rest of you up into bone meal for making Soylent Green crackers, merely working at the same salary for a decade is a reward! Just think of what a luckie duckie you are.
El Cid
We just need to give that much more assistance to blue-state Democratic-led governments so they’ll hire more, in proportion to the amount that the ‘red states’ are shedding gubmit jobs.
butler
The President doesn’t control the BLS. He can’t tell them how to run their reports.
Except that they won’t know or care when it gets revised. They’ll just ignore or downplay it, like they always do.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@liberal: I agree. I was just trying to say that the Republicans fuck up even the stuff they supposedly believe, which I know they don’t.
Jeff Spender
@gene108:
I wonder if this is the same sort of mentality that is afflicting people in the anti-vaccination movement. You know, these kinds of services have always been around, and they’ve always been reliable. They’re taken for granted because people adapt to the security they have and assume that it’s just a natural ordering of system in which they live, not actually dependent on the complex systems of taxation and other things.
Maybe, in their minds, they don’t think they can ever lose these things. The anti-vaccination people that I’ve talked to seem to think that because we don’t suffer from the diseases that we vaccinate against, or have little experience with them at all, that they can’t be that bad. “Let nature take its course…people get sick for a reason” seems to be the refrain. So when their child gets a bordetella pertussis infection and they hear 6 weeks of the whooping and the coughing…well, they’ll know it’s just nature.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@PaulW:
That’s it. I’m referring to the GOP as ‘Farva’ from hereon in.
liberal
@Waynski:
Yes, as I think Dean Baker pointed out this morning, it’s only one month’s data.
OTOH the overall pace of recovery in the economy is pretty weak, given how nasty the crash was.
OTOH^2, if the rate of the past few months keeps up, it might be enough to ensure Obama’s reelection.
OTOH^3, IIRC 55% of non-Hispanic whites voted for McCain in 2008, during a time when there was no way anyone could possibly blame the crash on the Dems. Now it’s a few years later, and a large fraction of the electorate is never capable of understanding business cycles.
John S.
@Jeff Spender:
It also helps to have high profile celebrities pimping their backwater beliefs 24/7.
askew
@El Cid:
That is going to be hard to do with a Republican House.
RalfW
@liberal:
Yeah. I saw some utter context-free bullsh*t the other day on some network (CBS? NBC?) that with Japan lowering their corporate tax rate, the US had the highest rate in the known universe. Oh noes!
Did they bother to look at Japan’s effective tax rate vs. ours? Or France’s? Or Russia or South Africa or even Ethiopia?
Of course not. That requires calculations and 15 seconds of explanation of “net of deductions and credits” (y/know, the massive giveaways to oil companies, perhaps). So we just got topline bullsh*t. Not bottom line reality that US corps get off easy. Like, say zero tax rate GE. (Shockingly, that’s an NBC link. Seems the networks can’t even remember what they themselves report…)
liberal
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Fair enough.
I’m still conflicted about those temporary payroll tax cuts, though. They’re probably better than a lot of other tax cuts that could be used, but they’re also great fodder for political attacks on SS.
(Just did Schedule H for our nanny’s pay last night, and was wondering “why the hell did W-2 say 4.2%, yet H says 10.4%, which dividing by 2 gives 5.2%?” Googling it seems like 10.4% is 4.2% plus 6.2%, and that reminded me about something about the employer half going back up. (Of course, it usually falls mostly on the employee, despite it being remitted by the employer.))
Jeff Spender
@John S.:
It’s not even really that, I think. It’s the anti-science sentiment. My God, Andrew Wakefield has been completely discredited, and they’ve even discovered a genetic component to Autism. It’s about emotional narratives, science be damned.
Sorry…I had to delete a great deal of this comment. I have trouble controlling my temper with this particular topic.
RossInDetroit
John McCain must be pleased with this good news.
liberal
@RalfW:
I was only thinking of the individual income tax, but your point is totally valid.
liberal
@Jeff Spender:
Though the truly filthy rich could easily just pay for their own fire protection, their own hit squads, their own…
liberal
@Jeff Spender:
Yeah, though part of it is that due to the amazing success of vaccines, they don’t see many stories of people dying or becoming disabled from communicable diseases.
Don’t get me wrong; I despise that asshattery as much as the next guy.
Waynski
@butler: Thanks for the correction on the first point. On the second, you’re right that wingnuttia will ignore/downplay a good report and excoriate a bad one and I was thinking that it’s better to at least be right about the numbers for the President. But since you pointed out he doesn’t control them, it’s a moot point.
John S.
@Jeff Spender:
In my opinion, it had even more to do with Jenny McCarthy and for a while Jim Carrey. I have a son with autism, and at his school amongst most parents and teachers, her name is reviled.
RalfW
OK, deep in that Times article that started this delightful ray of sunshine here, there’s some really weird/unsettling stuff:
So, wait, job growth sucks, so lets tap the brakes? W.T.F.?
They’re suggesting that 8% unemployment may be the “new normal” so lets just go ahead and go back to historic interest rates. Though shit, workforce! So sorry, people loosing homes and health insurance! The math demands sacrifice!
I’m sure the Fed is tired of basically negative interest rates. But to bake in 8% as the new normal for unemployment is a disaster in terms of human suffering and dislocation. What a fuck up that will be if this report has any basis to it. Ugh.
RossInDetroit
K-Thug’s most recent NYT column explains why the Fed is only doing half of their job by just keeping inflation down. They’re also supposed to work for full employment. That would mean raising inflation a little, which would also help start reducing household fixed-value debt (mortgage principal).
Krugman attributes this timidity of the Fed’s part to browbeating from the Right, who don’t give a damn if you’re unemployed as long as their bank accounts aren’t losing value due to inflation.
gene108
@liberal:
And government investment NEVER creates jobs, except for military bases.
Military bases can prop up the economies of some very out-of-the-way places and are essential to stimulate the private sector spending in those places and without the government spending on military bases those places would be ruined.
There’s NO WAY any other type of government spending could have similar effects anywhere.
@Jeff Spender:
Makes sense. For plenty of folks there’s some irrational need to morally justify the unfairness of existence, rather than try to find ways to eliminate the unfairness.
liberal
@John S.:
Well, I tend to be a pessimist about these things (regardless of the politics), and unlike a lot of the O-bots here I’m very critical of the way Obama handled the stimulus negotiations.
But without flaming on about the nuances of that, I will say that if the economy kind of stalls out and Obama wins anyway, it would be kind of nice to see the poli sci economic-determinism guys eat some crow.
schrodinger's cat
Bobo has a sad because Obama was mean to his blue eyed boy wonder.
japa21
Two distinct numbers reported
Job gain 120,000. Not great, but the operative word is gain.
Unemployment rate dropped to 8.2% Not great but the operative word is dropped.
Which do the average people hear, the numbers or the operative words?
John S.
And it looks like TPM has gone all in with the ‘this is good news for
McCainRomney’ narrative.ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@John S.:
__
This is the oldest and longest running conflict.
__
[The scene: 11,500 BP, near the end of the Younger Dryas, somewhere on the coast of what will later be called ‘Spain’]
__
Caveman #1: Did you feel that? I think it might be getting warmer?
Caveman #2: Fool. It’s getting colder.
C #1: I’m sure it’s getting warmer.
C #2: No, it isn’t.
C #1: Yes, it is.
C #2: No, it isn’t.
C #1: Yes, it is.
C #2: No, it isn’t.
C #1: That’s not an argument, it’s just contradiction.
C #2: No, it isn’t.
C #1: Yes, it is.
. . .
and here we are today.
liberal
@gene108:
Yes, even as far away as Germany…
:-)
schrodinger's cat
@liberal: I think Obama is deeply influenced by the Chicago school version of Econ, which has been the mainstream version anyway for at least the last 30 years or more.
liberal
@japa21:
It might have significance in terms of political rhetoric, but the unemployment rate isn’t so meaningful, at least in terms of small changes, since it can be highly influence by mass movement of workers into and out of the labor force.
Jeff Spender
@John S.:
I see. If there is that much animosity I’m probably underestimating her “star power.” I know my number one question for people in her movement is always, “Do you really want to take the word of a Playboy Bunny over a doctor? Which one has a medical degree, and which one knows what the CD4 glycoprotein is?” (you can substitute CD4 glycoprotein with just about anything–the CD47 surface protein is what red blood cells carry to tell the phagocytes and the cytotoxic t-cells not to kill them, for instance–it’s always good to keep them on their toes).
@liberal:
I think this is also true. Which is why we’re having outbreaks of pertussis in enclaves where they’re refusing to vaccinate. I think with more exposure in the media to how horrible this affliction is, people may come to their senses. Or we can just blast the airwaves with pictures of people with polio.
Jeff Spender
@John S.:
I’ve seen this unfold on the Twitter machine. It’s really disappointing, but I suppose I should have seen this coming. They’re starting to become a conventional wisdom machine.
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat:
Depends what you mean by “Chicago”.
If you mean it as I usually hear people use it, Obama is definitely to the “left” of [the hard core version of] Chicago. Listen to crazy douchebags like Eugene Fama, for example.
OTOH, one could mean Chicago as a label for neoclassical econ as we know it today, in which case he’d fit right in, IMHO.
Jeff B
@General Stuck: Can you provide a link to this? Not familiar with ChuckEE though Krugman did make similar statements back in March: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/opinion/krugman-states-of-depression.html
John S.
@Jeff Spender:
It’s ironic, isn’t it? I never would have thought a former playmate and failed actress would have so much clout, either. But after she appeared on Oprah, wrote a book and took to the lecture circuit, all of a sudden a cottage industry of DAN (Defeat Autism Now) doctors sprung up with snake oil to sell. And according to the CDC, vaccinations are down and occurrences of measles and whooping cough are up. I know correlation is not causation, but McCarthy played a fairly significant role in all that.
GregB
In the words of Governor John O’Neill from Connecticut:
Americans don’t want hand outs. They want hand-jobs!
(The crowed reportedly roared with approval)
schrodinger's cat
@liberal: Neoclassical or as it is known in some circles, neoliberal economics, pioneered by Friedman and Lucas etc, and others at the Econ Dept of UChicago.
BTW most of the GOP is to the right of Friedman, who did think that Keynsian policies had at least short run stimulative effects.
gene108
@liberal:
The employer part of the 2% cut never went down. The tax went from 12.4%, split 6.2% between employer and employee to 10.4% with the employee getting a 2% cut, i.e. 4.2% employee tax and 6.2% employer tax.
RalfW
@gene108:
And NASA/the space coast. I mentioned a 60 Minutes piece in a past BJ thread because, of course, no one could have predicted that big budget cuts coupled with further NASA slashes by the Repub House has led to 7,000 direct job losses and another 7,000 indirect job losses in Brevard County, Florida.
I’m sure all the people being foreclosed on, and all the shuttered businesses will bloom back to life in a few weeks or months when our low-tax Florida utopia flowers.
Comrade Dread
If we only put a negative tax rate on the wealthy and literally just parked a dump truck full of a s***load of money in their driveway, think of all the jobs they could create!
Jeff Spender
@John S.:
The thing is, when you look at all of the data, the correlations start to tell you something. Herd immunity is breaking down in several places. It coincides with the popularity of the DAN campaigns, as well as the propagation of really bad information from places like Age of Autism.
Science-Based Medicine does an admirable job of fact-checking them and calling them out on their bullshit, but it just isn’t enough.
And, I understand the emotional toll autism takes on a family. I understand they need outlets. But people like Jenny McCarthy are putting other people at risk when they spread their nonsense, and I have to draw a line.
I mean, Age of Autism spun a report by the CDC which recently revised the prevalence of autism in the population upward. AOA tried to claim that it’s because, oh noes, the evil vax companies are behind it! Blah, blah, blah–not taking into account that any time you screen for disease the incidence, and thus the prevalence, is going to go up.
As for the topic at hand–I’d like to think that once people start to lose basic services, or learn that privatizing everything is not going to save them money in the long run–they’ll suddenly realize they’d been had.
My experience tells me they’ll blame liberals and candy corn and talk about how they have them their guns.
General Stuck
Brooks has again repaired to the fainting coach with a galloping flareup of Obama Derangement Syndrome.
Oh, The Horror, The Incivility of it all!!, “social Darwinism” “the end of medicare as we know it’ and all around Obama being a big meany to tea tard royalty Paul Ryan and his courageous soylent budget. Why? Cause Politifact said so, that’s why!!. Now shut up, and slurp yer porridge. Libtard welps.
John S.
@RalfW:
It’s all good. Governor Skeletor Scott (R-Eternia) just signed a massive corporate tax cut bill into law while gutting Medicaid, so now our economy is sure to flourish!
Jeff Spender
@schrodinger’s cat:
My girlfriend goes to U of Chicago. She’s friend’s with Friedman’s granddaughter. I met her briefly when I was there for a while, but didn’t really have a chance to have the epic debate with her that I want to have.
She comes by her libertarian views honestly, though.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
On an OT note: Holy shit, Rachel’s story on the crazy bullshit going on in Michigan these days.
the fugitive uterus
i wish Obama would say “fuck these people” – I and the Democrats will create loads of jobs through stimulus, let them howl all they want because their power is gone and they are also dinosaurs, if we get back the House and Obama is re-elected, we can use their austerity shit against them, talk about what is happening in Europe, only we should stop fucking around and wasting valuable time with faux bipartisanship that means giving republicans every single fucking thing that they want. stop talking so much about how the economy should rely on the private sector alone. you people aren’t idiots, get er done.
gene108
@Jeff Spender:
Part of the issue with autism is the better ability to detect/diagnose it.
The rates of people diagnosed with autism has shot up, not because people are getting it at record levels, but we can detect it better.
For some people, they just see the correlation that autism rates are on the rise therefore there must be an actual cause to increase these rates.
In other words, things weren’t like this when I was young and the world was perfect, therefore there must be something going wrong now.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
we were due for one.
political impact:none.
Jeff Spender
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
I refer to my state’s Republican-run government as “Governor Hitler and his Cronies” for a reason. And only a handful of people in this state seem to actually care. You know, because the only cities being hit by EFM’s are predominantly black. They’d never go for a city like Ann Arbor, would they?
Why, yes. Yes they would.
the fugitive uterus
@John S.: what a fucktard. our gov is Nikki Haley – if that makes you feel a bit better.
Villago Delenda Est
@RossInDetroit:
Rentiers fear inflation more than anything else.
The Rentiers need to be hunted down and exterminated.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Jeff Spender:
Good fucking god. That shit’s just plain terrifying. And this is the template the GOP wants everywhere, I guess. And they’re doing a fucking good job of ensuring it gets done, and it really feels fucking like there’s no way to fucking stop them anymore.
Jeff Spender
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
I wonder how much of it is because people don’t care, don’t understand, or are just willing to forfeit power to feel secure.
It really is terrifying. Local governments are pretty much being dissolved by unelected and unaccountable “Emergency Financial Managers”–union contracts being voided–look at what they did to Benton Harbor.
It’s just…this is why I bury my nose in my medical textbooks. I can’t deal with it anymore.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@liberal:
Speaking as a defense worker my conservative cowokers assure me DOD has nothing to do with government and is apparently entirely privately funded off Wallstreet.
bogdan
You didn’t waste any time DougJ. After months of good jobs reports and barely a peep around here.
But what can you expect from gloom porn addicts.
Satanicpanic
@Marcellus Shale, Public Dick:
Exactly, it’s april. This will have about as much effect in November as yesterday’s baseball games.
Villago Delenda Est
@gene108:
There are a lot of things that aren’t the same as when I was growing up.
For example, battered wives…it wasn’t reported in the media back then, it was hushed up as a “private matter.” Likewise, a lot of sexual abuse just wasn’t talked about or reported. So the rates on both appear to have gone up as awareness has risen, although experts say the rates were probably about the same, if not worse.
An understanding of context eludes a great many people about a great many things. To take another example in a similar vein, crime rates. They’re going down, but the perception, based on “if it bleeds, it leads!” local news, is that it’s rampant. Our entertainments on the tube spend a great deal of time focusing on crime, mainly because it’s out of the ordinary for most people, therefore has novelty value.
The lust for war on the right has much more to do with media perception than reality. Most Americans have no experience with the actual military and what it does. So it seems exciting and interesting. Ha! Even in combat zones (you vets can back me up on this) it’s boring routine punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
Some Loser
@Jeff Spender:
I heard about something like months ago in the great state of Michigan, but I thought someone was going to do something about this.
How come the Department of Justice has not done anything about this yet? (If they did, then I am sorry. I have a shitty internet connection and cannot watch longish videos.)
[So anyway, so how is Michigan doing? I mean besides this bullshit.
Grew up there near Detroit in a small (predominately black) town.]
bogdan
Of course what gloom porn addict DougJ failed to mention is that previous month was revised up from 224k to 240k and the unemployment rated dropped to 8.2%.
Both good things….which explains why nobody here wants to mention it.
Martin
@RossInDetroit: Well, I think the Feds efforts have been to encourage lending in order to permit expansion which leads to hiring. The biggest problem that developed in 2008 WRT hiring was that the banks, who had convinced everyone to trust them to always be available to lend money, and therefore nobody should stockpile their own cash (as tech companies do), then reneged on that deal. So companies that had built a regular borrowing cycle into their businesses got cut off.
The problem here is that it doesn’t matter if the Fed has employment as part of its charter if it has no ability to tell the banks it’s lending money to how to use it. Employment isn’t part of BofAs charter, so the Fed can only act indirectly and hope that they’ve built the right incentives for the banks to act. But the Treasury had a different set of incentives which was to make sure the banks had enough capital on hand, which the banks are still struggling with. And the banks are still exposed to economic challenges in Europe, which are dragging down their ability to return to a more normal state. Raising rates would help employment but hurt those other efforts – the Fed now has a vested interest in encouraging institutions looking to buy bonds to buy them not from the US, but from Spain and Italy and Greece instead – and expanding the rate gap from our nice safe bonds to their sketchy ones is key to that. If the Euro falls, employment here is going to take a much bigger hit than it would have otherwise due to low Fed rates.
Frankly, it’s a mess, and there aren’t enough players here in a position to help relative to those who are in trouble – and some of the players that are in a strong position aren’t doing enough. Private investors are just terrified of buying any of this debt and so they keep buying Treasuries at 0% interest. That’s good for our ability to pay off our debt, because we keep refinancing it below inflation, but in order to help the economy the federal government then needs to use that benefit to spend, which the GOP won’t let us do – and it’s simply insane that the GOP is getting away with arguing that the private sector is being hampered when the Govt is loaning them money at 0% interest, and they still aren’t investing. For fucks sake, there’s nothing more you can hand the private sector to incentivize them. They’ve failed. Time for govt to do it.
Gex
Anyone seen this? Texts from Hillary
Good fun.
Martin
@bogdan: Well, in an election the trajectory matters more than the point in time. The trajectory is still upward, but weakening.
Don’t blame DougJ for instinctively understanding what a 2nd derivative is and its implications.
Some Loser
@Martin:
Blasphemer!!!!1!
I’m know expert on the subject, but do you think the Feds will do anything about this? I doubt the Republicans will like the idea, and our conservative Democrats will probably oppose any government intervention, too.
Maybe the Senate will have some sense, but with all those Tea Baggers in the House . . .
So yeah, what is your take on any possible legislation?
Bruce S
It’s Krugman’s fault for talking smack about the stimulus!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Martin:
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Martin, your comments are almost always polite, detailed, on-point and educational. It is seldom that I read one without coming away feeling that I’ve either learned something new or at least come away with a revised way of looking at data I’d already been exposed to, and you never come across as pompous or an asshole. In a better world you’d either be a front-pager here or have your own blog. I can imagine that in this world you don’t have enough spare time for that, which is our loss. But thanks for the comments.
Yutsano
@Some Loser: I don’t know if this means anything, but the IRS is technically on a hiring freeze and we’ve been leaking out job announcements right and left. The simple fact is it takes humans to do what we do, and even with the constraints of budget cuts something had to give. So even if there will be no support from Congress, I have a feeling federal hiring is going to continue and strengthen here. Drown that Grover.
Villago Delenda Est
@Gex:
Those are hilarious! (or should I say Hillaryarious?)
RossInDetroit
@Martin:
Lack of demand in our economy is a bigger problem than lack of capital. Plenty of companies are sitting on capital, but they don’t expand production because their current facilities are under-utilized so there’s no point. And they don’t hire more because they have all the bodies they need. To get the consumer side of the economy going, what’s needed isn’t more capacity, it’s more consumer spending.
Rising wages, and fixed debt dropping as a proportion of income would help there. Increased inflation would be a step in the right direction in that limited sense. Although there are negatives, such as people living on fixed incomes having their buying power eroded by rising prices, etc.
Satanicpanic
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I second, Martin’s comments are one of the best things about this blog.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Some Loser:
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CalcRisk puts up an article after every FOMC meeting summarizing the gist of what was discussed in the released minutes. Last time the take away I got out of it was that they are still thinking about whether to engage in another round of quantitative easing if the economy cools off too much, but the indicators the Fed is watching have not hit the triggers for them to launch QE3 at this time. The problem we have is that QE is a very indirect way of stimulating the economy and the opportunities for that stimulus to find its way into other pockets besides the labor force are legion, so they are sort of pushing on a string when it comes to employment. We really need a fiscal stimulus from Congress.
bogdan
@Martin: yawn…never thought I would have to include this link on a left wing blog site. Oh well, the stupid it burns doesn’t matter which way a site leans I guess and since Cole is a Not Republican (so he says), well you can’t fix stupid anyways.
http://www.nationofchange.org/three-charts-email-your-right-wing-brother-law-1314715523
cckids
@Gex: My favorite is the one with Boehner. Ha!
Martin
@liberal:
Given that Obama hasn’t been allowed to spend any money at all after his first month in office, the recovery is doing better than expected. No recovery has been this anemically financed in a century.
But there’s a much bigger risk in the jobs numbers than I’m seeing anyone discuss. And that is, who is benefitting from the recovery? Rather than overfocus on the national rate as a gauge to how Obama will do in Nov, I think we should be focusing more on what the state-by-state rates are doing, particularly in the battleground states, and where the voters are likely to put the blame for their weak/strong recoveries. For example, Ohio’s unemployment rate is down to 7.6% from a high of 10.6%. PAs peaked at 8.7% and is only down to 7.6%. That’s no worse than Ohio, but the job situation there hasn’t improved nearly as much because it never got as bad as Ohio. Florida peaked at 11.4% and is down to 9.4%. They’re turning around, but they’re still high – and higher than the national numbers. Michigan peaked at 14.2%, and they’re down to 8.8%. That’s a really good recovery so far.
Question is, who will get the credit/blame for these? They all have Republican governors. I think Michigan and probably Ohio will credit Obama – because cars are a big part of their jobs economy. But I think Florida might go the other way – their space industry is dying, so will they give a Republican governor (I know they hate him) and legislature credit?
CAs unemployment rate is still high, and because CA is so large it dominates the national trend, but we shouldn’t give a shit what the CA rate is – we’re going to elect Obama out here. By the same token, nobody should care what Utahs rate is either. (Again, simply in the context of handicapping the election – of course we should genuinely care that people in Utah have jobs). So, I much more interesting analysis of how the economy relates to the election would be to narrow the attention to the expected battleground states, and to try and suss out who the electorate will credit with the recovery.
It’s worth noting that NYs unemployment rate is climbing, mainly due to job losses in the banking and investment sectors – and the legal sector. That’s not likely to be material to the election in any way (NY will vote for Obama as well) but it’s probably masking better recoveries in most states in the same way that CA does.
RossInDetroit
If anyone wants to read The Bonddad Blog on this, it’s here. They’re usually very good on the employment subject.
sample quote:
honus
@liberal: You are correct that capital gains have long been preferred, but traditionally only by a point or two, not over 15% as now. And the conventional wisdom, backed up by the economic evidence is the preferring capital gins by a percentage point or two creates the maximum economic benefit; any larger preference is simply a windfall, and has no practical stimulative economic effect.
Martin
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Thank you. I wouldn’t be a good FPer, btw. A FPers job is generally discovery – finding stuff out there, curating it, and bringing it to us here. You won’t find much of that in my comments. I don’t read nearly as widely as you might think – I tend to find a topic and drill down into it. I rely on the FPers doing the discovery for me. I’ll generally defend the FPers if they blow it on the analysis, because it’s hard to put a lot of time into getting that right when they’re really spending time finding interesting things for us and getting it to us pretty quickly. They’re beat reporters, I’m long-form reporting. They really deserve much more credit than we give them for being able to hit dozens of publications every day and bringing us pretty good analysis in addition. I can’t pull off the first part. I’m just not well balanced in that way.
That said, I am creeping toward my own blog. Problem is that I do web design, so I have high design standards, and I’m a perfectionist. So what a normal person would be happy with in an hour, I’ll need 20 – and probably more. Not something I’m particularly proud of. I need to hide from my boss and my wife for a couple of days and finish it off. But it’d be pretty long-form stuff. Probably only a couple of narrow topics that I’d return to over and over. But my dad is pressuring me to do it as well – and now is actively questioning if I’m deliberately putting it off until after he dies, so I’ll probably get to it pretty soon here – guilt works too well on me. One of the things I really want to be able to do on the blog is data visualization (which I do a LOT of) – which is something that people desperately need more of. That’s still relatively hard to pull off on hosted sites, and I don’t want to drop money on my own domain and server hosting until it’s warranted. I just need to push through that part, really.
El Cid
@askew: Pffft. You libruls and your “reality”.
Jewish Steel
@Satanicpanic: @ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I would argue that sometimes Martin goes too far and is also funny and welcoming.
Plus the clarity and good grammar.
Who will rid us of this turbulent commenter?
Jewish Steel
@Martin:
Absolutely they do. I can barely keep up with the two or three blogs I read daily, let alone scouring the web for source material.
FlipYrWhig
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: That’s because “government job” as a phrase doesn’t mean a job paid by money provided by the government, it means a job that is overpaid and half-assed. Just like how “government program” means “welfare,” which is why so many people who _do_ use government programs say they don’t. No self-identified hard-working person can have a government job or use government programs. That’s what Those People do, not them.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Martin:
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That makes a lot of sense. Good luck on the project, hopefully you can keep your designer’s “just a few more tweaks and it will look right” tendancies under control.
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For the most part yes, but I think one of the strengths of this blog is that the FrontPagers span a range in this regard and some of them (kay for example) bring a fair amount of analysis and long-form reporting to the table, not just news aggregation and “hey, did you see this?” reportage. Which means that I can get some of both here. That’s something to think about when you read other commentors bitching about how John has ruined the site by bringing in too many other FPers. IMHO the site is just about right as it is now, there are enough FPers to provide some diversity and stylistic range but not so many that the site loses its sense of core identity.
Martin
@RossInDetroit:
I agree, but I challenge the CW on the consumer spending problem. From what I’ve been able to see, it’s not just a problem that consumers lack money to spend. Yes, that’s a problem, but I think an equally large problem is that consumers are offered shit to spend on.
Typically in recessions, consumers shift from less thoughtful disposable spending (they make an increased number of poor value purchases) to more thoughtful spending (purchases that deliver greater value, longevity, quality, etc.) And while the overall amount of money flowing into consumer spending is lower, where that money gets spent shifts to a much greater degree. What you tend to see is the middle of the consumer spending sector dry up. Instead of buying $2 on Starbucks every day, they’ll spend $100 on a really good coffee maker – or they’ll go to $1 coffee, 50% cheaper and only 20% worse is the calculation they’ll make. I think too much of our economy pre-2008 was dependent on consumers buying shit, and hoping that they’d tolerate buying shit forever. When consumers demanded better value for their money, who was there to take advantage of that? Well, some companies were, but most companies really needed to shift how they operated – and they needed capital for that.
If you look carefully at consumer goods providers, some did VERY well from 2008 until now. And they did well because they were positioned to deliver greater (at least perceived) value to consumers. Consumers were more thoughtful with their spending and they put vastly more money into certain brands and certain sectors than they did pre-2008. It is possible to spur consumer demand by innovating and creating better value and to feed the economic engine from that side as well. It’s a bit of supply-side Jesus, but not the kind that the GOP usually advocates. Tax cuts don’t matter here. Subsidies generally don’t matter here. It really requires innovation, access to capital, and access to markets to work – it requires that business be able to react to these shifts, and lack of capital pretty much kills it dead.
Short version: recessions cause consumer spending to not only contract, but also to change in nature. We need to make sure that both sides get supported.
Martin
@Jewish Steel:
I would agree with that, actually. I have flaws. I won’t deny that.
liberal
@honus:
I don’t think that’s true. I’m pretty sure there were things going way back like taking only 60% of a cap gain as contributing to AGI. I saw a graph of the effective top cap gain rate versus the effective top overall rate, and there’s long been pretty large gaps.
But this is only IIRC.
Devil’s in the details. To the extent that capital gains are from economic rents, you could tax them at 100% (or as close to that as practicable) and it wouldn’t matter. Good example is any gain in real state due to a gain in the land value. In fact, taxing it at higher rates actually increases economic efficiently, because it prevents “hoarding”.
Apart from rents, it depends on the relevant elasticities. At the intuitive level, I’ve never bought the argument. If they’re discouraged from investing, what the hell are they going to do with the money?
liberal
@honus:
OK, I found a nice-looking graph on the web.
It shows that throughout most of the history of the US income tax, rate on cap gains was much less than top nominal rate.
Corner Stone
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I disagree. It seems pretty obvious, at least to me, that Cole should consider adding a 12th or maybe even 13th reflexive defender of the Obama Administration.
Only then can balance truly be achieved.
Corner Stone
@Jewish Steel: One can only hope that Martin succeeds beyond his wildest aspirations on the expressed projects.
Corner Stone
@liberal: Interesting graph, thanks. But not strange that owners have favored ownership throughout our nations’ history.
liberal
@Corner Stone:
No, not strange at all, sadly.
Cacti
120,000 jobs created, unemployment drops.
Ye gods, what terrible news.
OzoneR
@liberal:
I always disagreed with this. I think the difference is there’s few people alive who remember the recovery from the Great Depression. We didn’t fully recover from it until the 1950s.
My family came to Indiana in 1929 and the stock market crashed a few weeks after they came here for a new life. My grandfather was one of the first ones let go and was unemployed for years and worked in the TVA for peanuts the rest of the decade. My grandmother enjoys regaling me with stories about they ate gruel and lived in a shack that kept getting destroyed by tornadoes for years during the Depression and through World War II. ‘Things were always hard’ she used to say during the 1990s when things were clearly not so hard.
If her recollection is true, the recovery from the Great Depression was hella shitty too, perhaps more so.
bogdan
Put this in your gloom porn pipe and smoke it DougJ.
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2012/04/setting-record-straight-on-jobs-report.