Where is the US economy headed?

I have no doubt that some of America's unemployed workers will take arms against those making their lives dreary and poor. I would not mind seeing CEOs slaughtered in their offices.

The economy will not improve. Oil production has peaked. We have made a mess of the infrastructure and the transportation system and there are too many humans on the planet. We should work on the transition back to the Middle Ages.

I just read this somewhere else, didn't I?

Unions? Democrats?

Good evening. Feel free to scroll past this. I don't claim to be the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.
I was digging through the BLS' employment report out on Friday. Rather bleak (U-3 up from 9.6% to 9.8%), but a couple of things caught my eye.
The number of new jobs was only up by 40K, well short of the 150K needed to keep up with population growth. Job losses were in state/local government and retail.
The former was not unexpected as tax revenues shrink. The latter was a bit of a surprise to me.
Manufacturing jobs held steady, and the average work week inched forward a bit to almost 40 hours/week, suggesting that companies are either going to have to pay overtime or hire additional staff.
The growth industries last month were the usual: health care and temporary staffing.
Temps is the one that intrigues me, adding 500K jobs this year.
Employers are reluctant to take on the cost of adding new employees. Instead they seem to opt for temps, who can be let go for whatever reason.
I think that will become the new norm in the American workplace, and, as I have suggested before/elsewhere, we will become a more mobile society.
We have or will become less inclined to put down roots in one community; less inclined to buy houses in the suburbs and more tolerant of relocating to somewhere else.
(more later, if anyone gives a s**t)

How come you are filled with such hatred, pom? I believe every single poster on this forum should totally and emphatically condemn this woman for what she is, totally whacko and hate filled. Not only conservatives, but liberals, all should condemn her and her post. If you do not, that says something about you as well, and it would not be pretty, folks. That even includes the more moderate Democrats among us, such as rjb. How about it?

I am challenging all to do what is right and speak out against this kind of hatred.

More, rjb.

This is not at all surprising to me, rjb. What it is telling us in no uncertain terms is that business managers and owners do not have confidence in the future for their business. One huge component in this lack of confidence is the uncertainty of what government will do, in regard to taxes and regulations. Of course, most conservatives believe that having a president and much of Congress that do not clearly believe in free markets, that presents a huge dark cloud on the economic horizon. Also we cannot ignore the unstable economy in general, wherein the entire country is essentially in trouble financially, not only on the individual level of personal debt, but on the level of governments going broke.

Yahoo did a piece on disappearing jobs this week. Among them were journalists, judges and CEOs.

I am going to suggest to everyone they take note of something called the "Fair Tax," which is of interest because it might have the potential to finally take off in a really bad economy. It has the potential because everyone realizes something drastic is necessary to help fix our economic problems. So also keep an eye on Mike Huckabee, who was the only candidate during the last election cycle that fully supported this idea. I don't know if he still does, or if that issue could take center stage if he makes another run at the presidency, but I suspect he would still support that policy. If you want to consider real change, that would be real change, because it would eliminate the income tax system as we know it, at least hopefully it would, because I think most people would only favor it if the income tax was totally eliminated. The beauty of it includes the fact that it could totally remap the playing field with foreign imports, by virtue of the fact that every product would be taxed the same in this country, and it would also give us many other advantages to deal with tax evaders, illegals, etc., etc.

Really? Why not slaughter them in their ritzy homes, in front of their kids going to expensive, exclusive schools?
Slaughter them all, according to POM.
Slaughter them all.

Self-defense. Since 1979, 80% of all AMerican workers have seen their wages stagnate. What is the difference between slow strangulation and one quick shot? In the end, none; while the strangulation is in process, the pain is enormous.

You are going to be asked to provide evidence that "since 1979, 80% of all American workers have seen their wages stagnate." Can you prove that with any statistics?
And could you elaborate on your advocating killing CEO's?

First of all, that statistic surfaced earlier this year and is readily available through the United States Census Bureau. I have posted it and posted it and posted it here. I am not alone in citing it. Since discovering it, I have heard it on the radio and television, read it on the internet and in magazines and papers.

That sort of knowledge is a match . . . which might be needed.

Take a look and see what happened to the income of the top 1%.


Surely, you know about consequences? The Tea Totalitarians might blame the liberals but the liberals have nothing to do with slide in the economy. However, the real villains are bankers, lobbyists, CEOs and more.

I'm not upset about the general public not knowing that their real wages haven't increased. That's despite having had a similarly themed conversation over the past decade with many, many women. The conversation usually began with a reminiscence: "My uncle raised his family selling shoes in Minneapolis. He didn't own the store. He worked for it. His wife never worked and he sent his kids to college. He was a handsome man who wore a suit to work everyday." "My friend who was born on Pearl HArbor Day was the only child of an elevator operator and a housewife. She had private piano lessons and went to a private college where she majored in piano performance. The daughter of a family with the equivalent income would never have a life like that today."

I'm upset that intellectual, left-leaning women were putting 2 + 2 together but never quite figuring out where four was.

I have been saying on these boards that we are being robbed and raped and it is not Washington, D.C., that is the perpetrator but the captains of industry.

During some administrations, Washington was an accomplice. Loosening controls on the toddlers that run businesses certainly didn't help and we can blame the raygun administration and the false idea of trickle down. However, just as children need discipline, so do the selfish adults, who may stand tall but who are gimme toddlers at heart.

Of course, with control of the media, the great unwashed may never know what is going on. We can fault the demise of the unions for the lack of communication and for the loosening of provisions for opportunities of self-improvement (study groups, craft classes and more) that unions sponsored in their Golden Age at the end of the 19th C.

Our resident parrot, ican, blames the left for stealing money it never earned. He might be a Fifth Columnist, the paid tool of a group that seeks to destroy the common man. After all, three decades went by before people began to see that the ordinary person, the man on the street, was being robbed.

How long do you think it will be before someone takes action? Unless you are a stockholder, you can't unseat a CEO and he can make as much money as he wants while the rest of the workers starve.

Poverty is on the rise and it is because opportunities are limited and salaries have remained in the doldrums for an entire generation.

What is going on POM is that formerly poor and socialistic nations in Asia have thrown off the economic and social policies that held them back for so long and are now embracing competition and free markets for both labor and goods. As a result U.S. industry and its workers now face levels of international competition that didn't exist for us a couple of decades ago. Overall the process isn't a bad one in that serious poverty has been drastically reduced in Asia, and Americans of all incomes now purchase cheaper imported goods. Our economic situation is now far more competitive and that affects everyone at all levels of the economy. Those here who lack special skills or education now must compete with workers in China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. There is really nothing that can be done about that without inflicting even more serious harm on our economy. The challenge is for American industry and labor to become more competitive and to adapt to the reality around them.

The well-paid auto workers of the UAW now face serious competition from Asian automakers, including their non-union manufacturing facilities in the South. (Their last strike against General Motors was an idiotic attempt to prevent modernization of two major assembly plants in Flint Michigan to enable them to better compete with Toyota plants in this country. Now these plants and the jobs they offered are gone. They resisted constructive effort by the company to raise productivity to protect both competitivenmess and jobs: now both are gone.

Very true; it's all about comparative advantage. The only way the US can compete is to continue creating new products and services that leads the international competition like Steve Jobs does for Apple Computer.

As for POM's claim about the middle class income not keeping up has some truth to it; it's when wives started working to supplement the household income, but as the years passed by, most found that two incomes wasn't what it used to be for only the father working. That's true in some respects, but as with everything, we cannot generalize such issues because there are always a huge group of middle class families who have done well during that same period.

The fact that real wages have not risen in 30 years was cited this morning in an NPR story about marriage, as part of the reason why working class marriages are more likely to fall apart than the marriages of college grads.

It seems to me that several people here have their heads in the sand vis a vis this well documented statistic. It may be that my friends and I have been puzzling over the fact that our generation was never as well off as our parents' generation was, but, this statement -- and the effect of stagnant wages -- had to have caused a bit of head scratching at some time.

The first time the notion of a flagging standard of living and flat wages became apparent to me had to have been in late 70s. I had read a piece . . . perhaps in the Boston Globe or the Atlantic Monthly . . . and it was followed by a television profile on the spending habits of Baby Boomers. On of those interviewed was the David behind David's Cookies, a high end cookie shop located briefly in Harvard Square. David spoke of how our generation couldn't look forward to easily buying a house the way our parents could. He offered the solace of truly delicious, albeit expensive, cookies.

As I typed this, I heard in my mind the screeching of some of our resident harpies in what they think is rebuttal complete with tales of their imaginary friends and an Admiral Huff-n-Stuff blandishments served with a side order of strawmen.

I grew up in America. The folks in my neighborhood built their homes with their own hands. They drove used cars until they could afford a new one, which they drove for ten years or more, a/c was an expensive option.
We cooked our meals at home and played monopoly on saturday nights.
There were no such things as cd, dvd players, video games, atvs, laptops, i-phones, etc etc etc to blow money on. Processed foods were a luxury and few in number. Fast food? Starbucks?
America's economic woes cannot and will not be solved by politicians or bankers. Our only hope lies in the hope that an increasingly spoiled populace that doesn't know the difference between luxury and need will wake up and smell the coffee.

Thats all I have to say about that.

Starbucks coffee?