Where is the US economy headed?

How true! They didn't watch their spending over all the good years, and now they want to play number games in Sacramento by moving money around like chess pieces only politicians know how to do - and increase taxes so they don't have to make the tough calls. We should throw all the bums out of Sacramento.

I can understand what you are saying, Hawkeye. I have been following the issue of fresh water in CA, which is diminishing. It seems that over the years, farmers and ranchers have been guaranteed so many gallons, cities get so much, fisheries get so much. But, oops, there isn't enough water to meet those quotas. So now folks are at each others' throats.

By the way, Genoves, did this exchange ever get explained by you?

rjb, We now have a mandatory 15% water reduction program in our area. California's population continues to grow, but water resources and reservoirs have not kept pace with the growth. Although many cities in California have lost home owners, water usage has not decreased. It's a battle between saving fishes, supplying water to our farms, and water consumption by some 37 million people.

Our city is relatively lucky, because we get water from Hetch Hetchy from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Central Valley Project and Delta, underground water, and from the Santa Clara Water District. I regularly watch the toxins content of our water, but it's always been high quality thus far.

I am certainly not gloating about the water situation in CA, Tak, from here in VA. Ten years ago, you could draw a horizontal line across southern GA. Below that was drought-land. The line moved up through Atlanta to the GA/SC border in a few years and then to the SC/NC border quickly. And to the NC/VA border even faster.
This is going to become a big problem here.

I lived in Monterey three different times for a total of 6 years between 1988-1999, and for as long as I can remember there was talk about how the Aquifer was unlikely to be able to withstand the draw amount that the leaders were claiming was available for pumping. The problem is that once too much fresh water is pumped out salt water comes in and poisons the entire Aquifer. The leaders spent a lot of time coming up with ways to sell the rights to the water (and thus enrich certain interests), water that I think turned out not to be real (have not lived in monterey for a bit, and not kept up with this story).

Same goes on in Sacremento, The holding of endless meetings to find new ways to slice and dice money that does not exist....money and water that the rational heads have claimed for decades is not likely to be real.

You talking to me? You talking to me?

Here, realjohnboy, is some data from the Wall Street Journal.

even after a recovery takes hold.

Companies will have little appetite to ramp up hiring until they feel the economy is truly out of the woods and a recovery is firmly rooted.

Against that backdrop, many economists predict the unemployment rate will hit 10 percent by the end of this year. Bernanke stopped short of that figure, saying it will be somewhere in the 9 percent range. Regardless, both private economists and Bernanke agree the unemployment rate will keep climbing into next year.

The Fed says unemployment will remain elevated into 2011. Economists say the job market may not get back to normal _ meaning a 5 percent unemployment rate _ until 2013.

More than 5 million jobs have vanished in the recession, and Bernanke predicted "further sizable job losses" in the coming months.

Fallout from housing, credit and financial crises _ the worst since the 1930s _ has hurt America's workers and companies, and the pain will continue. The jobs market traditionally doesn't rebound until well after an economic recovery starts.

More companies recently announced job cuts. General Motors Corp. laid out a restructuring plan that includes cutting 21,000 U.S. factory jobs by next year. Microsoft Corp. said it was starting thousands of the 5,000 job cuts it announced in earlier this year and left the door open to even more layoffs.
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When the Unemployment rate hits 10%, Realjohnboy, the masses, who do not delve into the intricacies of Economics, will decide that Obama has had enough time to give us GOOD "change" and has not done it. The campaign season will be in full swing then and the populace will not be happy.

You realize, of course, Realjohnboy, that the 8.9% Unemployment rate does not measure the number of people out of work or who are underemployed.


If you access the Bureau of Labor Statistics and go to U-6, you will find that the REAL Unemplyment rate( which includes the discouraged who have exhausted thier unemployment benefits and the people who are working part time and are looking for a full time job, the rate is very close to 10% Unemployment.

I think FDR is one of Obama's heroes. That may be why Obama is trying to match FDR's record in Unemployment during the thirties.

WHat folks have not figured out yet is that as of today there is still a huge amount of bloat in the financial services, retail, construction and restate segments of the economy.....these jobs are never in the foreseeable future going to come back to what we became used to. We have compensated a bit by chasing a good number of Mexicans out of low wage retail and also construction, but at the end of the day high unemployment( 7%+) is the new normal. We are going to go to at least 10%+ and I think 12% before we start dropping, but it will drop not fast enough nor far enough to save the skins of the corporate and political elite whom have just taken out a huge loan on the backs of our kids and grand kids. There will be hell to pay down the line, the ruling class kicked the can down the road but that is all they have done.

I'm just wondering how many of those new college and high school grads are really finding jobs? I don't think the government's unemployment rates even considers them amongst the unemployed which I roughly estimate as around 10-million/year (out of the 304 million US population) looking for a job.

As they say: First there is graduation, and there is unemployment.

Yikes! I bet you are right about new grads not being included in unemployment rates. A further problem is that, to the extent they were job ready upon graduation, their useful abilities may have atropied. I don't know the shelf life of a recent grad is, but a couple of years of un or underemployment isn't going to geive them any advantage in the job market.

Genoves, if you go back about 5 or so pages, perhaps more, we talked about almost all of the issues addressed in the WSJ article, particularly the under-employment thing, agreeing that it is big. I referred to the "official" unemployment rate as a nod to the reality of the flaws in that statistic.

That's another issue that's not being addressed; when college grads can't find jobs trained for specialties they can't get any experience in, they begin to lose their knowledge. That can be disastrous for the majority. With college costs going upwards, that's a sacrifice not many can afford.

I should have said: first there is graduation, and then there is waiting on tables.

I'll let someone else research, but the figure as I understand them is that about 40% are either working in their field or planning to go directly to grad school. Most of the rest are moving back in with mom and dad and doing the best they can....like work a min wage job someplace. They have student loans to pay, not doing anything is not an option.

hawkeye, Do you think you might be able to find the source of that info? I'd be very interested in it.

I wish I could...I tend to remember info but not where I learned it. I think that this was one of the rare occassions when I was watching TV news. They were talking about the small number that graduated at the end of fall 2008, how they ended up by march or April. The prediction was that spring 2009 students would prob do worse.

You can defer those loans for quite some time if you can't pay, though you will still incur interest during that period. It was helpful for me to do this for a while when I couldn't afford both life and loan repayment directly after college.

You're right, though - I'd hate to graduate now.

On the other hand, I know several people who have gotten new jobs lately, so anecdotal-ly, there are some out there.

Cycloptichorn

I can't source it, either, but it sounds similar to a WSJ article in the past three weeks.