Where is the US economy headed?

Unfortunately every president has done this, even democrat presidents.
Bill Clinton did it (and it cost American lives).
Bush 1 did it.
Reagan did it.
and so on.

So why the criticizm about Bush doing it?

To not acknowledge the excesses and mismanagement in the Bush 43 administration would be dishonest. But as you point out, to accuse George W. Bush for everything from hang nails to the global economic crisis is equally dishonest. Any serious student of history can trace the banking woes back to the Carter administration, festering during the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, escalated during the Clinton and Bush administrations, with failure of Congress to deal with the developing problems all along the way, to bring us to the point we are now.

No President is capable of amassing all the problems he will have into the early part of his administration, but they occur throughout. Mandatory term limits ensure that every President will inherit unresolved issues from the previous administrations.

Other than whatever complicity he had as a Senator, Obama was not to blame for the mess he inherited, but neither can he absolve himself for any mistakes in dealing with it. And as time passes, he will be able to accuse the previous administration less and less for any mistakes that he makes.

America's number 1 selling car: smaller than a Smartcar, better gas milage than a Prius, cuter than a Mini, and gets more babes than a Vette. All without a redesign in 30 years.

Anyone wanna take a guess what car this is?

http://www.boston.com/cars/newsandreviews/overdrive/2009/06/little_tikes_cozy_coupe_is_ame.html?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed5

Cute. (I borrowed it for use on the global warming thread but gave you credit MM.)

Seriously, I still haven't figured out how a policy that makes automobiles less accessible, making fuel more scarce and expensive, and increasing the cost of private transportation by thousands of dollars in a time of economic stress can possibly make things better.

Well, now we have a true indicator of how bad the economy is actually getting.
Even in Canada...

http://www.thestar.com/living/article/646871



To be fair, the article also says that drugs are partly responsible, but I just thought the whole idea of blaming the economy was interesting.

Foxie wrote:

And what past, current or future "mistakes" are you talking about? Isn't it possible that rather than "mistakes," they are good for the economy? Why the negative spin?

It only works if you raise taxes at the same time.

That doesn't sound like a bad thing at all....

Has the following graph been posted? It shows that unemployment is worse even than Obama predicted with no stimulus plan. With the stimulus plan, the line does not reach over 8%. So, perhaps we could even make the case that the line with no stimulus plan might have been accurate, and that the stimulus plan has cause the line not to decrease but increase unemployment? It looks like it would have been less than 9%, but now we have 9.4% before even reaching the end of the second quarter.

Yet, amazingly, the mainstream press reports bright spots, good news in the bad news. Obviously it would not be reported in that manner if Bush had a couple of months left in his term of office and an election was nearing.

A great post,Okie. But try to access the OFFICIAL STATISTICS FROM THE BOARD OF LABOR STATISTICS. There is a measure called U-6. That measure of Unemployment includes:

l. Those presently unemployed who are receiving Unemployment Compensation.

( That adds up to a very high 9.4%)

but, if you add--

2. Those who no longer receive Unemployment Compensation( and are NO LONGER COUNTED)

and

3. Those who are working only part time but want and need a full time job,

You get to the incredible number of 16%.

Yes, Obuma has taken the wheels off the US Economy so that we now have a U-6 measure of 16% Unemployment--or one person in six.

Here are some additions to the statistics given above

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John Williams’ Shadow Stats site (http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data) looks at various government reported financial estimates and shows how these estimates are skewed and inaccurate. The following chart shows how the government reported unemployment numbers can be interpreted when basing these numbers in reality:

As you can see, the current unemployment rate could be a whopping 16%!

The government numbers, on the other hand are available at: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

To summarize: Employed persons consist of:

All persons who did any work for pay or profit during the survey week.
All persons who did at least 15 hours of unpaid work in a family-operated enterprise.
All persons who were temporarily absent from their regular jobs because of illness, vacation, bad weather, industrial dispute, or various personal reasons, whether or not they were paid for the time off.
Unemployed persons are:
All persons who did not have a job at all during the survey week, made specific active efforts to find a job during the prior 4 weeks, and were available for work (unless temporarily ill).
All persons who were not working and were waiting to be called back to a job from which they had been laid off need not be looking for work to be classified as unemployed.

Graph from your link, John Williams shadow stats:



Another interesting one in regard to gdp:

Hey, Thanks, Okie--That was a great help. Scary,aren't they? Notice that one of the lines refers to U-6.

Okie, I wonder if Cicerone Imposter, who insulted you again and again in the vile hope to discourage you from posting, would be able to understand the import of such graphs?

Everybody can rest easy now, White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, shown here at a press conference last fall, says the economy is showing encouraging signs.


"White House Advisers Push Back on Stimulus Criticism
President Obama's advisers say the economy is gaining momentum and the stimulus package is only just beginning to pay dividends to the American workforce."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/07/white-house-advisers-push-stimulus-criticism/

So the next red dot on the following graph should change directions. Everybody relax now.

I hope you don't mind, Okie, That was such a great link, I just had to post the last part of it.

***************************************************************
The Obama administration warned that without the stimulus package,
, the jobless rate would hit 8.8 percent in 2010 -- advisers had said the recovery package could hold unemployment to 7 percent. But that rate hit 8.9 percent in April, and then 9.4 percent last month.

House Minority Leader John Boehner said Friday that the administration was "ripping off the American people."

Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, told "FOX News Sunday," the deficits the administration is producing represent the "most serious" the country has ever seen.

"I can tell you if we get to a $20 trillion debt, this country -- and we're headed down that road -- our ability to pay and service that debt is going to be questioned all over the world," he said.

Vice President Joe Biden said Friday that the stimulus is funding 3,600 projects and that $11 billion has been spent to date on highway construction. But while he argued the package was having an impact, he said, "less bad is not how we're going to measure success."

"We will not be satisfied until we are adding jobs on a monthly basis," Biden said.

I don't mind at all. Until the Obamaites figure out that the government does not drive the economy, but private enterprise does, we will continue in this downward slide and funk.

The graph like the following that I posted apparently doesn't work, so I found another site that works for now, which shows projections of unemployment with and without Obama's stimulus, with points plotted so far for what has actually happened, which exceeds both projections. I think this is interesting when you recall the emergency weekend months ago where Obama, Harry Reid, and company were all saying "we have to do something, we can't do nothing for another day, etc. etc."

An interesting thing about the unemployment rate that had me scratching my head, that being the news stories indicated that the number of people losing their jobs were less than expected in May, yet the unemployment rate jumped to 9.4% in May instead of the projected 9.2%. I think I have found the answer to that, the unemployed are taking record times to find another job, thus less people than expected are leaving the unemployed rolls. The following site indicates the time to find a new jobs after being unemployed is at an all time high.

"The extent of the difficulties finding new work are indicated by one particular startling number. The share of the unemployed who have been out of work and searching for a job for at least six months is now at nearly a third"27.0 percent"and an all-time high, despite the fact that employers have been shedding jobs at a record rate over the past few months. With so many new workers laid off, the increase in the share of long-term unemployed is striking."

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/employment.html

I almost forgot, but didn't Obama lengthen the benefits times for the unemployed as part of his stimulus bill? I think so. At the time this occurred, I as well as other people made the obvious observation that this would not stimulate the economy or encourage people to get jobs. Sure, it helps people go longer without a job, which actually makes at least some people less aggressive in obtaining new jobs, so it might be a factor in the unemployed going longer without obtaining new jobs. It would only be a factor, but not the overall determinant, which would be the relative health of the economy itself.

But the point is that lengthening unemployment benefits definitely does not work as a stimulus. It only works as an entitlement, which produces nothing in the long run.