Where is the US economy headed?

I noticed that Obama made little mention of jobs and the economy in his speech.

Is the current dismal economy and high unemployment the new norm?

Probably. The majority of the employed have little or nothing to do with an economy. They are, in the main, in a psychologically maintained calm and balanced condition. Treatment in the community.

What's so special about being employed?

The employed pay the taxes Obama uses to prop up the unemployed.
Less employed people means less taxes paid, this means Obama has less tax
revenue to spread around to a growing number of unemployed Americans.

What's so special about being unemployed?

what's wrong with this picture?

What's wrong ??? The data and the labels associated with it.

CEOs of what companies??? Goldman Sachs or the great majority of smaller companies in this country ? - which, in aggregate, employ most of the workers in this country.

The Label "Avg. Worker" is clearly wrong in several cases. It should be lowest paid worker. Beyond that there are other data quality issues. For manufacturers (consider Apple) are the data for foreign subsidiaries included in the "Avg. Worker" ? I suspect they are.

Overall this provides a deceitful picture.

In our company, which employs about 500 people, the ratio is 12.

I know for sure that in many industries in this country the ratio is less than 20.

Being free from clocks, bosses, drudgery, uniforms etc.

I thought you were a freedom lover H2O? Perhaps your obsessive interest in freedom betrays a yearning for it which you disguise to yourself with assertions of having it.

And why do you want Mr Obarmy to have more money to distribute? The more he has and the more power he has to pull your strings. And the desire to pull strings has to be excessive to mount a campaign to be President.

One of America's leading economists and intellectuals wrote in his essay Dementia Praecox (1922)--



And that was long before colour television came in. I suppose he might use "madhouse" if he was writing today. Even the women want to "work" now.

On the weekend I'll dig up the excerpt from Nouriel Roubini's Crisis Economics where he notes how the Fed bailed out failing banks with long-term loans, because those banks had made bad bets. I don't have time just now.

I agree that the chart is misleading to a point, but the message is accurate. Most reports I have read on this topic supports the spread in pay between CEO's and their workers.

The pay and benefits enjoyed by "most" high tech companies are some of the worst - even when their performance is bad to worse.

The SanJose Merc publishes the stock trades of company CEO's and officers, and their aggregate weekly trade often exceeds $50 million.

I've seen individual's netting over $20 million; it's really obscene.

Isn't the high tech sector one of the few where astronomical CEO pay might actually be justified?

Because those companies are creating real products that people like, and which create jobs for skilled workers?

c-imposter is green with envy and that's how he justifies his irrational comments.

To some degree. Some still get golden parachutes even when they've failed to perform. Where I personally have difficulty understanding these egregious pays when sharing the wealth with their workers would improve our economy.

Decades of wealth envy has deteriorated c-imposters brain, turning it into mush.

Okay I found the passages I was looking for in the book:

"In effect, the government jumped directly into the market, reaching far beyond the usual mechanisms of injecting liquidity--cutting the overnight Federal funds rate--and made loans directly to ailing financial institutions. It became the quintessential lender of last resort, making loans and liquidity available to an ever-widening cross section of the financial system."
--Crisis Economics, p.146.

Traditionally, the Fed had lent banks money overnight via the discount window with a penalty compared the Federal Funds rate (the rate at which they borrow from each other overnight), but during the crisis, it lent for up to 90 days at no penalty. (So these weren't technically "long-term loans", but they were 90 times longer-term than any loans the Fed had made to banks before that.)
--Ibid.

According to Roubini, the Fed didn't just come to the aid of banks with liquidity problems; they came to the aid of those that were insolvent as well:

"In normal times, the lender of last resort helps individual banks with liquidity problems. But in this particular crisis, central banks ended up providing support to virtually every bank."
--Ibid., p.148.

The Fed even sent dollars to other central banks abroad, so that those central banks could loan dollars to failing foreign banks, so that those banks could make payments on dollar-denominated loans, which they otherwise wouldn't have been able to make.
--Ibid., p.150.

Let's look at some actual data on the issue:

http://www.epi.org/publication/ib331-ceo-pay-top-1-percent/

The Finance industry surely does skew those numbers upward, but it's a large part of our economy and fair game for the discussion.

Cycloptichorn

The EPI is a front organization wholly owned and controlled by Labor unions. It is not an objective source of data or opinions. It is the chief propaganda organ of the AFL/CIO.

Note the reference to "workers" in the tables. Which workers are included; which excluded in the comparison? There is enormous potential there for getting any ratio one might want. Even here the CEO-Worker ratios are far less than the 475 touted for the "Avg Employee" above.

It is interesting also to note the data in the tables. Some of the data labels are very misleading. What does "Share of Change" mean? I defy you to figure that one out.

Finally it isn't clear just which CEOs are included in this data and which are excluded. It appears likely the data includes only CEOs of publicly traded companies, which must publish CEO compensation. The much larger set of privately held companies are under no such requirement. Some of them are very large with CEOs who are paid a great deal. However the vast majority are much smaller than the huge public companies that get so much attention and their CEOs generally make a lot less. The point here is that this collection of companies as a whole employs at least as many people as the publicly traded companies in the survey, and, if it were included, the ratios would be far less.

I blame a lot of this lopsided pay scale on the board of directors who approve these unequal pay scales for CEO's and officers. By their actions, they have hurt our economy in ways that can't be measured, because of the multitude of variables at play in the world economies. All I can assume is that our economy would have been much stronger if the wealth was shared with their workers.

georgeob, You're doing it again! Your blaming the messenger and not challenging the message. Most of the studies support the article Cyclo posted, and there has "never" been any opposing article to refute these reports.

In short you choose to prefer the self-serving propaganda of politicians and labor unions you favor. OK by me, but this is one of the several " urban myths" which a credulous public served by a sympathetic media have accepted as true, when they are, in fact, false.

There are many verifiable facts that strongly suggest that the high and low ends of the pay scales in this country (and others) are diverging. However the reasons for it are many and varied (including lower skill levels at the entry level, and a changes economy which depends more on high end skills). Moreover the real extent of it is wildly exaggerated - as Cyclo himself has demonstrated. The EPI now asserts its much manipulated ratio is about 220, which itself is less than half of the even more wildly exaggerated value of 475 posted farther above. Evidently even that didn't raise a question in your mind or threaten your complacent and ignorant credulity.

I can assure you that my company is not included in the data set and neither are most of our competitors. The same is true of many industries across the country.

Prove it.