ASU2003

Blame Obama for Sky-High Unemployment - FOXNews.com

So, I could have put this in the politics section, but it also fits in here.

Do you think the Obama administration has any control over private companies? Are the private companies CEOs & boards guessing that taxes are going to go up and are cutting back jobs, or are workers becoming too efficient and are eliminating their own jobs? If I make a machine that doesn't need human interaction and can work 24/7, that means a few people aren't going to need to have a job anymore(and the company won't need me unless there are more machines that can be developed). And since I'm not in a Union, I can be let go at any time they don't have work (and don't benefit from my machines that are still working).

And the jobs that are left are pretty basic (there were more cooks in the Taco Bell today than customers, I could take care of that with a few simple machines ). It is hard to tell if the stimulus stopped millions of people from losing their jobs (I think it would have been a little better to have waited 6 months to pass the stimulus bill looking back). Then again, millions more are living how I live (very cheaply and spending less), I still don't see anything close to a 'Great Depression' that the media thinks is happening.

Do you think the government can do anything to create or promote industries (computers in 90s, DotCom in late 90s, housing in mid 2000), that were the driving force to get us out of the last downturns? Is it only tax rates and spending that determine if the job market is good? Or has the economy changed from one where millions of farmers were once required can now be done by a fraction of that. A factory can be run with hundreds of machines that don't complain, aren't taxed, and hardly stop.

edit: I forgot to add this article I saw today.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/12/news...ex.htm?cnn=yes

Willravel

Some things can certainly be done to facilitate a good or bad economic environment, but I wouldn't use words like "control" or "responsible". For example, the Obama administration is attempting to facilitate a "green economy". No control, but there are nudges that can be done to help.

Xerxys

^^ What does green economy mean?

It was my belief that things during the Bush era were cheaper because the US simply imported everything and outsourced everything. I feel the layoffs have been preemptive stances taken by companies in a hasty way. The only reason to perform such massive employment "changes" is if there is little production to be garnered from the workforce. If green economy means what I think it does (recycling - sourcing amenities/resources/services/goods back into the country) then it runs contrary to whats happening.

Don't you think bringing shit back would create more jobs than reduce?

ASU2003

I love the green economy, but it is a temporary fix. Solar panels, solar thermal, geothermal, and wind farms will last for decades providing cheap (or free) power. I would love to produce my own power, and am working on a few projects of that sort currently.

But there goes some money that my power company would otherwise get, so they can't employ as many people (if thousands of people were like me and started producing more power than we consume).

Xerxys

Ohh, I see, thats what a green economy is.

Now, just how much does that factor into the workforce? Are we even using so called new technology for the greater population to affect the companies? Tertiary corporations such as financial institutions, not those dealing with production. These contain the largest amount of USA's economy/working class and proportionally largest workforce in the US.

How then does the green economy impact us in a national scale as to cause a rise in unemployment?

Baraka_Guru

I recently mentioned this in the thread about Obama's performance: The Dow is up around 30% since Obama took office 10 months ago. Oh, and the GDP posted a gain last quarter.

Not a mention of that in the Fox article.

And I'll say this again too: unemployment is a lagging indicator. Much of what you see there could be from events that happened well before Obama even took office.

And rich people are starting to spend money again, which is a good sign as well.

__________________
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—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
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Willravel

It's not just power, it's reducing and making more efficient any and all consumption. Triple-pain recycled windows would be an example, as would electric cars.

People like the blame the president for a lot, I've been guilty of it before, but ultimately the office does have limits on its powers.

Poppinjay

The green economy actually lowers unemployment. By virtue of what green jobs are, they must be done locally. They are temporary in the sense that when the environment is all fixed, they will no longer exist. So, really until the planet implodes.

I have a green job and not only will it be there for a long time, we can't keep a full staff.

However, we're a non-prof and a ridiculous number of people we encounter could not give shit about the environment. So the pay is low and the reaction is mostly negative.

If current measures before congress were to be passed in full, it would mean about half a million jobs for Virginia. I would bet it would be about the same for North Carolina since both states have nearly identical topography and population numbers.

Unfortunately, only niche investors promote green companies and efforts. They would be akin to a person wearing orange at a Steelers game. Without any serious Wall Street representation, it will be very difficult to pass the legislation.

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Cynthetiq

with no economic policy nor SEC regulation changes, we're to believe that the numbers are better because the numbers are better?

I don't believe it one bit. It's more corporate smoke and mirrors.

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Xerxys

erm ... well, I don't know about that. The "quirks" of being rich include steady employment independent of the market = steady income = buying power.

Baraka_Guru

The one thing to realize about the average rich person: they're rich because they know how to protect their money just as much if not more than they know how to make it.

Rich people are affected by the economy too. A lot of them are self-employed or contractors. Think about that.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

robot_parade

Only to the extent that I think the stimulus plan should have been more robust. The rest of the economic problems are obviously not of his making - he inherited the economic crisis, and everything that comes with it, including unemployment. The stimulus plan was helpful, but not enough.

Seaver

Blaming Obama makes as much sense as them blaming Bush which made as much sense as blaming Hoover.

It's convenient, but dumb.

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"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

ratbastid

It's particularly dumb in this case because the situation long preceded Obama's oath of office. Bush came into office with a strong economy and a budget surplus, and by the end of his term we had the biggest debt in history, so it seems not ENTIRELY off-base to blame some of our economic trouble on his policies.

But it's generally true that any president at best has a tiger by the tail, where it comes to managing the economy.

roachboy

it seems that the entire question is pitched in the wrong direction here.
in general, increased unemployment is a function of concentration within some sectors made possible by a previous re-organization of production on transnational lines.
the dynamic behind that is the total abandonment of any sense that government has a meaningful role to play in shaping economic activity, a fiasco brought to you by neoliberalism, your favorite fantasy construct that replaces a rational assessment of capitalism entirely because it repeats well on ideological relays like faux news.

what's astonishing in the contemporary period is the extent and depth of the ideological inertia that we're seeing all around us. you'd think that the past year (well 30 if you thought about it, but hey why bother with that?) would have pulverized neoliberalism entirely--it revealed many (not all) of the systemic dysfunctions that neoliberalism enabled. but folk are still thinking more or less in the same terms as they try to figure a way through the wreckage created by it. it's crazy...but maybe it is after all just an indication of collapsing empire, that kind of total denial that seems historical characteristic of that period of collapse.

the administration *could* do any number of things to encourage different outcomes, but they'd have to go well beyond an idea of a green economy to really take hold.
not that i do not support such initiatives--i do. but i think they're too narrow, particularly if they remain just two words that you put together to make yourself think that maybe something different is possible somehow and does not become a centerpiece for actual policy.
for example, when the obama administration came into power, there was alot of talk about microcredit as a cornerstone of development policy both domestic and overseas.
that seems to have gone away.
but if unemployment is an actual problem--and you'd think it would be understood that way (that it isn't is just another example of the happyplace at the center of neoliberal fictions about the world)---then redirecting actual resources away from, say, massive military expenditures into micro-credit programs that would enable lots of new smaller business to get started that would employ folk...maybe something like that would be a good idea.

i will say though that i do not envy the position that obama's administration has been placed in by the epic fuck up that was the bush period. i see them as largely boxed in by it. which is a shame. but there we are.

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Seaver

Actually the economy was starting to falter before Bush took the oath, and actually became a mini-recession post 9/11. Quick action and the fact it wasn't multiple fractures to the economy makes it pale in comparison to this one, but it was already doing poorly as Bush took office.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

ASU2003

I'm not sure micro-credits would do much in the US. Unless the micro-credits were $100,000-$500,000. It costs a lot of money to bring a product from an idea to a functioning company with multiple employees.

I think that is the current issue. There is nothing major (WW2, computers, dotcom, housing, oil) causing people to need new innovation that is easy for a small start-up to be profitable. People are just holding on to what they do have (GM doesn't make any money on my 15 year old car.).

aceventura3

In a word - certainty. Right now there are far too many controllable variables created by what the federal government may or may not do. So, on the margins, if we eliminate some of these uncertainties and business owners have more confidence, they will act accordingly. What is going to happen with "cap and trade", health-care, tax rates, "tax" surcharges, compensation reform, bailouts, war, interest rates, accounting rules and regulations, union legislation, targeted federal subsidies, immigration, credit availability, and many more variables that don't come to mind right now.

One of the big variables was, we found that Obama administration is not that much different than Bush's on many key issues. If you recall there was a major market correction when it was project that Obama had a strong possibility of being President and the market has been recovering as the market has been finding that Obama and the Democrats in Congress are not doing anything too radical to fast. As the other concerns lessen, employment will improve.

Like during the Bush administration, Presidents get too much blame and too much credit for the economy. Our economy goes through cycles. During Bush's first term there was a recession and Democrats made a big deal about it being a "job-less recovery", now some conservatives are doing the same with Obama. In both cases if government gets out of the way the jobs will come. In Bush's case he made it clear that his administration was not going to increase the costs to employers. When Obama makes that clear or when business owners know what the increased cost will be, they can factor that into their business decisions.

The one big problem I have had with Obama on his leadership is his negativity. Starting when he was running his rhetoric has been overly negative concerning the economy and our ability to recover. I like leaders who focus on what is possible and not constantly looking at the past. If I hear how he "inherited" something again, I am going to forever tune him out. How about repeatedly saying: "I inherited the greatest nation in the history of the human race, with people who can accomplish anything". Gee, just be positive.

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Seaver

I've given Obama a lot of credit for the way he's handled things.

However, at this point can we PLEASE stop with the "we inherited this (fill in the blank)... " crap?

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

Wes Mantooth

I tend to agree with you on this. While it is unfortunate that certain problems fall into a Presidents lap that severely impact his administration, I just don't care. The "we inherited it" mantra just comes across as as a cop out and a ploy to sway public sentiment.

"Don't blame me for not fixing it, it was broken when I got here!"

Personally I'm not interested in how broken my sink was when the plumber arrived all I want to hear is how he plans on fixing it.

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pan6467

For the past 25+ years the problem has existed. We just were lucky or unlucky to find presidents that were able to cover things and make them not seem so bad. They never improved anything, just band aided and passed it on to the next guy. Now, it's caught up to us and it's a bitch.

Over the this time the reasons we have gotten here people saved less and relied more on credit. Interest rates to save were not stimulus enough to do so. Hell, when the interest is 1-5% there's no reason to save. Technology took off and everyone wanted the latest toys. The stock market was unnaturally growing. Companies merged to form MEGA CORPS but did so by leveraging their futures that very rarely they made and thus it ended in people losing work, pay rates decreasing, and so on.

It's not just the out sourcing to other countries it's the lower pay rates and loss of good paying jobs that have hit us in the groin. Companies couldn't really raise prices even though their materials, taxes, health care benefits and so on may have increased. So they had to pay less and ship jobs overseas to compete.

That caused a vacuum. Real estate and high end goods began to suffer, so government laxed rules for credit. With the credit people could buy houses and get cheap credit cards but prices had to go up sooner or later.

The true killer was $4 gas and ARM rates going up. Once those two factors hit, credit crunched, and people found they couldn't pay... thus losing houses, not being able to pay their creditors and so on.

Now, as this has been going on, government could have been using tax dollars to truly rebuild the infrastructure and thus creating better paying jobs. Government could have regulated the health care industry and placed price controls to limit growth and costs. It did neither. It worked to keep the stock market artificially growing, it worked to keep interest rates down but sat on it's hands to truly preventing us from getting here. In other words, government continued to help the very rich but did nothing for the little guys.

My problem with Obama is that he is negative, he doesn't truly have a plan to recover except to throw money in places that help very few.

Unemployment may drop, but for jobs making minimum wage aren't going to help much, especially if taxes go up and inflation does come.

If you go out and put the money into rebuilding the road, the bridges, the electrical grids, the cities, sewers, landfills and so on. Companies will sprout up that specialize in these areas and start paying better. Government thus rebuilds a tax base.

Then you look to manufacturing and start offer incentives, tax credits for research and development hiring... thus rebuilding industry, creating jobs and a tax base.

Finally, you make education affordable again. You lower tuitions to reflect what graduates will really be able to pay back. You help fund colleges to start programs that focus on technology. You go to the elementary schools and make them viable again, looking to the past and taking what worked and using it as your guidelines to improve.

Obama could truly be great in the rebuilding of this country but it doesn't seem that is what he truly wants to do. I find his attitude too negative.

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I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

guy44

I don't really think attitude is that important. Obama has been a mixed bag on employment - the stimulus was obviously necessary to avoid a massive recession, but the final size was too small. Most economists thought something in the $1.2 trillion range was necessary, but it wound up being smaller than $800 billion. Obviously, we can debate back and forth how much of this was Obama's fault and how much was the systemic problem of an ineffective Congress.

However, he has lately proven slow to move to deal with the issue of unemployment. His current proposals are, once again, a modest grab bag of good ideas, mediocre ideas, and politically feasible but mostly useless ideas (tax expenditures). I know a lot of people have been banging this drum for a year, but the single most effective thing Obama could do to improve the jobs situation is to give money to the states in order to ensure that they can balance their budgets without cutting services, and by extension, losing thousands of jobs.

I think the "green economy" stuff is a good idea - I mean, even if it isn't all that effective, it can't hurt - but he's playing things way too conservative in my opinion. (That's small 'c' conservative, as in cautious.) I hope whatever measures pass are extremely effective.

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pan6467

Attitude from your leader is everything. Would you rather follow a guy who hems and haws and doesn't act like he cares or knows what he's doing... or would you rather follow someone who would take charge, have a plan to work WITH even those who oppose him to better the country?

If I work for a company and the owner/CEO has no plans, can't figure out how to save it and makes no sacrifices to try to save it nor will he seek advice from those who oppose him.. I resign from GM... I mean that attitude trickles down to even the janitors, and everyone starts worrying and the work suffers and the downward spiral speeds up.

Whereas, if the owner/CEO is optimistic has a plan, makes his own sacrifices and does whatever it takes to improve the company for ALL, that positive attitude flows and people work harder. The plan may or may not work but there is hope passed on because of attitude from the leadership.

The rest of what you said has merit and there are parts there I strongly agree with.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

guy44

I don't think that you are wrong, per se. Clearly, if Obama got depressed and conveyed a sense of doomed hopelessness, things would be worse. I guess I'm just too much of a wonk - if Obama gave a rambling, poorly received speech on how crappy our economic situation is that also ensured the stimulus package was about $400 billion larger than it actually was, well, I'd make that trade in a heartbeat.

Also, I'm not sure an attitude change will gain him Ben Nelson's vote in the Senate. I also don't think Obama's attitude has anything to do with his not adequately funding the infrastructure projects, R&D, etc. that you highlighted. That has to do with what he can get passed in Congress, how quickly those items can be put into place to deal with the recession, and how effective each piece can be overall.

Besides, we're already dealing with the issue of Obama's negative attitude:

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