New findings out today show that our economy is strong. Please explain this me.

[tinfoilinfor2005]

Granted, my career was medical and I'm not a business major, but can someone explain to me how this can be, given that the country has the largest deficit ever.

If I made one hundered thousand dollars a year, I would consider that a good income. But if I were ten million dollars in debt, not so much.

I guess I'm really dense about this and would welcome some clarification.

[porphyrian]

1. It's based on the stock market. Most Americans own no stock.

That's like saying that it's peaceful in my house, so the nation is peaceful.

[Ravenseye]

2. That's sort of a shallow view

Just because you own no stock doesn't mean your life isn't affected by the stock market. What if you work at a publicly traded company? If the company's stock is tanking, you might be out of a job. Or they might expand and hire new workers. Or you could be auxillarly to it. A waiter at a restaurant in a commercial district. Stock market tanks, companies go under, less people there having lunch and less tips for you.

[sandnsea]

5. That's sort of an old-fashioned view

If the profits fueling stock prices are based on expansion in China and India, then the workers in the US commercial districts are already out of a job.

[Ravenseye]

13. So the stock market is now irrelevant to everyone?

Do you contend that the stock market doesn't affect everyone in this country either directly or indirectly regardless of whether they own stock? No matter what small fraction of the expansion overseas has fueled recent stock gains, there is still a massive amount of production here in this country. Sure there are plenty of big examples of companies going downhill such as Ford motor, but there are many more small companies growing right now, that aren't traded on the stock market yet, who are growing thanks to sales and partnerships with larger companies.

We're all tied to it. Maybe to a slightly less amount than formerly, but still to a very large degree.

The question shouldn't be about the strength of the stock market currently but what government policies are artificially keeping it here, by means of large scale deficit spending, and leveraging our own futures. The economy isn't 'bad' when you look at it on any given day or week or month. The economy is bad because what's keeping us here is quickly going to come around and bite us in the ass. The stock market is tied to people's lives. When our system finally collapses it'll be precipitated by a tanking of the stock and bond markets.

[sandnsea]

20. It's relevant as to its destruction of the working class

Money to stockholders and CEO's takes precedence over money to workers' wages and standard of living - not to mention, outsourcing, pollution, resource exploitation, global chaos, and the cost of our military to intervene and make the world safe for the multi-national.

We'd be much better off if the stock market collapsed completely, corporate personhood were revoked, and business had to stand on its sales alone.

[Ravenseye]

26. well that's about ethics then

not about whether the stock market affects people. That's my main point. People are indeed affected by the stock market whether or not they own stock. Sure...there are not great companies out there who will bottom line it and the CEO will pay himself 50 million a year and close profitable factories to save a few bucks by opening a sweatshop overseas and destroying the environment, but that's not every company.

There are plenty of jobs in this country. There are plenty of companies that have no overseas operations, aren't polluting or need military intervention on their behalf and they are affected by the stock market, and so are you.

Out of curiousity what do you think is bad about corporate personhood?

[sandnsea]

27. Aaaah

Free Market Libertarian, yes?

[Ravenseye]

29. No

I just think it's idiotic to deny that how the stock market does doesn't affect you even if you don't own stock.

[sandnsea]

32. Not positively though

As most everybody has said. It doesn't matter if it's going up or going down, working people are getting screwed either way. Corporations don't exist for the benefit of the worker after all. Enron collapses aren't that common, most corporations are just merged into other corporations if there's problem. We're told that if we let corporations have free reign, the workers will benefit as the corporation benefits. But that isn't true which we clearly see with wages stagnant and benefits increasingly cut, while stocks and CEO pay skyrockets. Capitalism is a good system, corporatism is horribly bad for the entire world.

[porphyrian]

16. If anything, the correlation between stock market success and the average American's economic...

...status is negative. Stocks shoot up when a company closes a factory and fires 40,000 workers, not down. The stock market economy is "booming" while an entire city's economy is destroyed. Sorry, you're full of shit if you're saying the stock market's success benefits everyone, and its failure hurts everyone, when the majority of the stocks are held by a tiny minority.

[Ravenseye]

25. I don't see that

Stocks sometimes go up when a company closes a factory and fires thousands of workers, particularly if that factory was losing money, or unable to compete profitably. If the company were to go out of business because it refused to shut that factory down and instead just went completely tits up and suddenly 10x or 100x as many people lost their jobs it'd be much worse and the stock would be valueless. Closing a factory and laying off workers is not automatically a bad thing for a company, though it doesn't exactly herald massive success, it isn't automatically a negative overall. For every company laying off workers, there are other companies hiring.

As far as having a 'boom' when a city is destroyed, I'm not outright surprised. The country and individuals are leveraged to the hilt to keep the economy moving. I saw an article posted on DU recently that showed that while Americans have a negative savings rate (ie we're going into debt more day after day) the Germans have an average of over 50k in savings or something like that. Or higher even. The city of New Orleans was destroyed, and the people who lived there scattered found work for less money, and are racking up credit card debt waiting for insurance checks, or just trying to survive.

As far as the fact that the majority of the stocks are held by a tiny minority, that's unimportant as to how it affects people on a day to day basis. It doesn't matter that they don't own stock, everyone in this country is affected by how companies do on the stock market, whether they own stock, work for a traded company, or not. If the stock market does well people other than the owners of that stock do benefit.

[tinfoilinfor2005]

3. I do own stock, but I'm not going Lamborghini shopping based

on the Dow Jones. If the market explodes, I don't want the payments to be passed on to my kids.

I know that I'm oversimplyfying, but the only way I can wrap my head around this is to try bring it down to smaller more understandable terms.

[fasttense]

4. This might explain it.

The Great Credit Bubble:
What Could Go Wrong?
BY FRANK BARBERA, CMT

Blissfully unaware, the average American sails through another day listening to the radio reports of a growing economy and the illusion of deep-seated prosperity. For twenty years, the US economy has been in a “boom,” with technology spearheading the economic growth and the standard of living continuously on the rise. At least this is the impression that has been created.

Not discussed is the increasing polarization between economic classes, the fact that over the last four years the so-called “recovery” has been one of the most uneven and lopsided events in US History. Almost never before have the poor and middle classes lagged so far behind the wealthy, with the one exception being the robber-baron’s of the Gilded Age in the late 1800’s. Spoon fed a steady diet of mis-deception and non-contiguous economic data, the majority of the American public falls steadily behind as real wage growth has now stagnated for 10 years with inflation data dramatically unreported visa-vie real world experience. As real wages have gone nowhere, or decreased (adding in the serious cut-backs in employee benefits seen in recent years), corporate profits have soared, gaining ground on the back of outsourced manufacturing and white-collar jobs. The disconnect between “Wall Street” and “Mainstreet” has truly never been so wide.

Yet somehow, we tend to look past it; we know the government numbers on inflation are too low, that unemployment is seriously under-estimated, and that wage growth remains absent. For the very wealthy, times have never been better as unrelenting monetary inflation has been channeled into unrelenting asset inflation. For the owners and managers of corporations (CEO’s), the bonus checks have never been larger, the stock options largesse never more extreme. For Corporate America profit margins remain lodged at historic highs, the windfall of globalization. Last year, Wall Street bonus checks were bigger than the GDP of most third world countries, and larger than some developing nations. Welcome to the “Wal-Mart/Nordstrom” economy, where the wealthy shop at Coach, Neiman and Nordies, and the less prosperous at Wal-Mart and other discount retailers.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

8. do you have the link to the rest of the article?

looks very informative. :)

[sandnsea]

10. Except Walmart sales are flat or down

While Dollar General sales are up 5-10%. So it's possible the economy is getting even worse for he bottom 50%.

[AndyA]

6. Ignore the obvious, do not question the authorities, and shut up.

That is all you need to know about the economy.

That is all.

Continue with what you were doing.

If you pursue this line of inquiry, you will be named an enemy combatant by The Decider/Decision Maker and will be put away for the rest of your life.

:rofl:

Seriously, I think the information is being slanted as a positive. Just like job growth. They keep talking about all the jobs they've created, but they don't discuss the ones that have been lost to outsourcing, nor do they address the fact that the majority of the jobs created under Bush's "leadership" :eyes: are of much lower quality than the jobs lost.

They will spin it to make it sound good for the sheeple and Kool-Aid drinkers. But more and more of us are discovering they are liars, and we are not being told the truth.

[BlueIris]

12. And NO ONE discusses what the REAL unemployment level is.

NO ONE. I've seen estimates that put it as high as 12% (and no, I'm not going to go dig through my bookmarks to find them, go dig yourself--you won't have to dig that deep). 'Member what it was between '29 and '32? Compare to today. Scary, no?

[lectrobyte]

24. Speaking of the Great Depression

Looking for the answer, I found this site, http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Timeline.htm , with some facts that seem to parallel our present situation.

Considering the era between 1920 and 1929:

• Organized labor declines throughout the decade. The United Mine Workers Union will see its membership fall from 500,000 in 1920 to 75,000 in 1928. The American Federation of Labor would fall from 5.1 million in 1920 to 3.4 million in 1929.
  
  
• By 1929, the richest 1 percent will own 40 percent of the nation's wealth. The bottom 93 percent will have experienced a 4 percent drop in real disposable per-capita income between 1923 and 1929.
  
  
• Individual worker productivity rises an astonishing 43 percent from 1919 to 1929. But the rewards are being funneled to the top: the number of people reporting half-million dollar incomes grows from 156 to 1,489 between 1920 and 1929, a phenomenal rise compared to other decades. But that is still less than 1 percent of all income-earners.
  
  
• Over the decade, about 1,200 mergers will swallow up more than 6,000 previously independent companies; by 1929, only 200 corporations will control over half of all American industry.
  
  
  

And those unemployment numbers:

1929 3.2%
1930 8.7%
1931 15.9%
1932 23.6%
1933 24.9%
1934 21.7%

[spanone]

7. Easy, it's called bullshit.

[ProfessorGAC]

9. A Couple Of Things

First of all, there are no new findings. The metrics used today are the same tired metrics used by Treasury, Commerce, and grossly prejudiced private economists for nearly 70 years.

Secondly, any objective and indexed review of these numbers, plotted against the multiple influences (inputs v. outputs) would show that the single highest leverage is applied by debt, both personal and governmental. So, as you said, it's unsustainable and is merely a somewhat attractive snapshot that doesn't resemble the real thing.

Compared to the baseline since WWII ended, mployment saturation is poor, growth is mediocre, inflation is only so-so, the ratio of median household income to the subsistence market basket is horrible (lower than at any time since WWII), and the expansion of the middle class is negative.

By no truly multi-dimensional, and objective standard is this economy strong. It's stagnant for sure, and i would characterize it as mediocre at best, and fundamentally unsustainable.

Last point: You're not dense. They're just lying.
The Professor

[sinkingfeeling]

21. Professor, isn't it also a 'war' economy? Big arms, oops, I mean defense

contractors are making money hand over fist. Isn't there a 'trickle down' effect on the smaller suppliers who make a thingy-do that is needed for a bunker buster?

[patricia92243]

11. If you earn $100 and hour and I earn $1.00 an hour, Statistics would show the average for workers i

is $50.00 an hour. Not an acurate figure, and I am having a hard time living on my $1.00 an hour and therefore don't think Bush is a hero.
:(

[Labors of Hercules]

14. Yep... and my health insurance company just ate my paycheck!

What a FABULOUS economy we have... The Dollar Tree never got so much business from me!

[tinfoilinfor2005]

18. God Bless The Dollar Tree!

:)

[AllegroRondo]

15. and the chocolate ration increased to 20 grams!

things are good, because we say they are!

[butterfly77]

17. If the country is in debt to china...

how is the country doing good, trillion dollar deficits...

[GeorgeGist]

19. May I remind you...

that in a capitalist system "our economy" is owned by capitalists.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

22. ideology

Neocons don't look at the entire pie. Only liberals feel obligated to include all Americans, be they unemployed, uninsured, displaced or other.

[radfringe]

23. the economy is sooooo good

that we must be really stupid not to realize it and it requires bush giving speeches to inform us of how good we really have it...

[Virginia Dare]

28. Voo Doo Economics...n/t

[tom_paine]

30. It's simple and staightforward: Bushevik numbers have no basis in reality

They are lying, as they have done about nearly 100% of everything.

Busheviks, since they stole the nation, have "adjusted" the methodologies by which taxation, economic, and employment statistics are calculated. And much more.

I never though that anything in America would ever boil down to a clear-cut battle of tyrants versus free people, good versus evil, but in facing the Busheviks, the American People face just such a simple choice.

Ironically, the Busheviks themselves have 'dumbed-down' Americans through their Propaganda Machine to be incapable of analyzing "shades of grey". Creating copies ofthemselves? Projection? Self-fufilling prophecy? Some combination of the three?

But what it comes down to is that almost ANYTHING that you hear from a Bsuhevik, particularly statistics, is as fraudulent as a Soviet Five-Year Plan.

The Busheviks are lying, plain and simple.

[rman]

31. They are lying

That explains it.

[electprogdems]

33. some thoughts---

the standard of living seems to be going up because a 2 worker household earning $80,000 can buy more crap (made in far away countries, in some cases by children) than a 1 worker household earning $50,000. But at what cost to real families, with 2 to 3 hour daily communities, expensive quality childcare and so on, not to mention the environment.

also, the inflation number does not include inflation for the necessities of life, like food and energy costs, which anyone who does the family grocery shopping, is going up.

Also, this change to a consumer society has brought us cheap consumer goods, but the true necessities are very expensive. I may not be able to afford my own house, or higher education or maybe I will go bankrupt if a serious illness happens to anyone if my family, but what the hay, at least i will have tank tops in every single color! Yeah ME!