I started a reply to Dave2 on his comment on yesterday’s post but realized I was working so much on it, it can pass for it’s own post!  See, I’m efficient like that.

If you didn’t see the post, go read the section on economy and then Dave2’s response.  I shall pick up from there.

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I’m absolutely no economist and I’m painfully aware that I don’t understand most of the stuff that runs the nation’s money.  I can’t completely explain the stock market to my kids other than it’s a general indication of what the public faith is in a specific set of companies, and don’t even get me started on how little I know about housing starts.

And I feel like I’m one of the smarter, more educated citizens.  So I have to believe that *if* I’m one of the smarter citizens, that means a lot of people in the country know less than I do.

If that’s true, then it’s all the more reason for our headlines to be as unbiased as possible.  Hopefully we can agree on that.  We don’t want a forever-rosy picture painted nor do we want doom and gloom all the time.  The danger of either is the impact it has on people’s actions.  Do we scare people into hoarding?  Do we mislead them into blissful happiness so they’re not prepared?  Do we pull the wool over their eyes?  Do we get them to vote one way or the other?

So when I look at the mainstream media, I see bad news and doom-and-gloom everywhere.  But when I do some of my own digging (and yes, listening to conservative talk radio some of the time) I find mention of facts that were conveniently left out of the doom-and-gloom headlines. 

I mentioned GDP in my economic treatise, and how it’s traditionally been the measure of what a recession is, and then Dave2 let me know that sane and modern economists don’t use that measure any more.  I was unaware of this.  After all, I don’t read the economist, where they say we’ve been in a recession since last year because they’re going to choose to use GDP per head instead of GDP for the nation.  Ok, they choose that metric instead; fair enough, I suppose.

If we can’t look at GDP, can we look at unemployment?  I can spin with the best of them.  What would this graph of our unemployment rates for the last 6 years make you think?

 

Maybe that unemployment is at near record lows right now for the last, what, 6 years?  This is straight from the US Dept of Labor Bureau of Statistics.  (I’m using http://www.tradingeconomics.com for the neat graphs.)

What about this graph depicting the job gains and losses per month?

This shows, in hundreds of thousands, how many new jobs (in yellow) per month there were in the US and now many less jobs (in red) per month there were.  This is for an 8.5 year span, basically from a year before Bush took office until right now.

Some might look at this and say - holy crap, Bush took office in early 2001 and “look what he did” to the job market.  That looks like more than a million jobs lost!  Or maybe you could look at the graph as a whole and notice how much more the numbers are in the yellow and it’s only for the last 4 months that the job losses were negative, and they’re WAY less negative than in 2001-2003. 

April 2008’s job losses were what, 20K?  There were more than a million new jobs in 2007 alone.  In fact, I don’t think we’ve had job loss since 2003.  So we’ve had millions new people get jobs in each of the years 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, and we’re worried about a couple dozen thousand? 

How come these “sane” economists aren’t giving us the full story?  No, instead, they say “we’re in our fourth straight month of job loss” and they use the 80,000 number and the 20,000 number in the headline to SCARE people.  Why didn’t they do a headline in November 2005 saying “359,000 more people found jobs last month“?  Or in March 2007 saying “259,000 less people looking for jobs“.  I’ll tell you why.  Because it’s POSITIVE news.  The news agencies hates positive news.

So maybe we should look at interest rates?  Here’s the overnight, 2yr and 10yr interest rates over Bush’s term so far

I’ll be frank - I have absolutely no clue what this really means.  All I know is that it was probably a really good idea to borrow money between end of 2001 and beginning of 2005, a bad idea to borrow money from 2005 to 2008, and now it’s a good idea to borrow money again.  Is that about right?

What I *do* gather, is the following.

• More people have jobs than ever before
• Lots of people spend what they shouldn’t (the credit crunch)
• Lots of people gambled on buying houses they shouldn’t (subprime debacle)
• Those people who gambled on buying houses they shouldn’t (with “interest only” loans, no less), now faced with either losing their house or going deeper in debt buying more things they shouldn’t, ended up trying to get a bailout and complaining that they’re stuck in the mess they put themselves in.
• The democratic nominees think that one way to fix this is to take away more money from successful Americans (raising taxes and a windfall profits tax)

Maybe we need some social networking site that allows people / bloggers to counter the headlines seen across the nation.  When someone claims “20,000 jobs lost in April” in a headline, something like digg or reddit allows people to point to it and expose more of the data.  Maybe it should be called perspect or wholestory.com or something, I don’t know.  I just wish it were easier for people to get MORE data without it being condensied into the headline the masses depend on for their daily opinion. 

As far as who owns the influential news sources, your claim is news to me (pardon the pun).  I didn’t know CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS were owned by conservatives (you didn’t say that; I’m inferring it).  I’ll have to check it out, but I can’t guarantee the timeline in which I do.  My quick searches resulted in a left-leaning list so far and how the Jews own it all, whatever THAT means.

One thing to note on the job gain vs. unemployment figures and charts is that a lot of them do not go into detail what kinds of jobs that people are taking and at what salary. i personally know quite a few people that were employed at a certain wage, were unemployed at some point, then became employed again at a lower wage than what they were making. At lot of these charts and graphs and numbers don’t dig deep into the real reason the economy is tanking: people make less money than they used to. Not everyone, but a good amount. So they have to cut back on many things. Those many things are now starting to include basic needs like fuel, housing and food.

I will go out on the limb here and say that most of the people that are reporting on the economy have not had to make the same cuts as the people that are listening to their reports.

I don’t think it’s so much that the Democrats are interested in taking away money from successful Americans. I think they are more interested in them not getting the huge tax breaks they get and working on getting them to be more fair. You pointed towards a fair tax, which I think is a great idea. But with how things have worked politically far too long, you can’t pull a 180 without any side screaming and kicking and fighting it tooth and nail. You have to moderately make changes to get to that level. At least that’s how I’ve always seen it.

Long term solutions is what I want to see. Not short term fixes to get votes. Which is why I question any candidate that thinks irrationally about today’s hot bed issue.

I don’t understand economics all that much. But logically, there are some things that are just way too obvious. You listed a few of them towards the end of your post. I think once we can focus more domestically as a whole, things will start to improve. It’s not a quick fix, which will have the naysayers and doomsayers spouting their negative ill, but in the long run, patience will pay off as they start to see things get better.

martymankinss last blog post..Scooter Sunday #3

Ooh! I’ve got five minutes before my meeting. Let’s see how far we get!

You’re right… you can spin stuff however you want. Example? I could come back and point out how part-time jobs are replacing full-time jobs and most of the new jobs created are minimum-wage positions that don’t drive the economy… thus unemployment statistics are falsely representing the reality of how crappy the job market actually is (and don’t even get me started on the Birth-Death Model being applied to employment statistics… EVERYBODY thinks that’s a joke… yet there it is, propping up the figures you’ve used to show how fabulous everything is! Spin! Spin!).

There are so many factors which contribute to the health (or lack thereof) of our economy that it’s impossible to have a handle on it all. How do you factor in all the foreign dollars being used to prop up our flailing banks and skewing interest rates? What about the very scary prospect of rising gold prices wrecking havoc with base bond values? We left the gold standard for our money years ago, but the precious metals market is still huge for us. Worst of all, we are a consumer economy… have you taken a look at consumer spending? UP! Yay! But most everything I read attributes this to inflation, which is tragic considering the credit debt we’ve racked up. Uh oh!

But back to your question… do I want full-scale falsified panic to worsen the economy more than it is? Of course not. But that’s not what I’m asking for. What I want is for the very real concerns that experts have with our economy to be examined before we suddenly find ourselves in a full-on collapse. For the media not to bring these concerns to light so people can be informed is irresponsible journalism and does us no good at all.

In the meanwhile, I’m still waiting for my stimulus check to arrive. I need the gas money!
Dave2s last blog post..TequilaQ

And can I just add that I laugh myself silly every time I see the “Beg Bar” at the top of your blog? Apparently things are SO bad with the economy that you have to resort to begging! There are no other economic factors for me now… THIS is what I’m using to gage the economy from now on… how many things are in Wayne’s Beg Bar? Right now we are at a Wayne Economic Index of 2, which is not that bad. I’ll start worrying when we reach 3. If we get to 4, the situation is serious. When you get to 5, I foresee full-on world-wide economic collapse.

Dave2s last blog post..TequilaQ

I interrupt this comment fest to bring you a link to Scott Adam’s blog entry entitled “The Economics Party” which I didn’t read until just now. It has some good points (not all of which I agree with)

martymankins, and everyone I know is making more money than they did a couple years back. Sure, lots of people had some employment woes in 2001-2003 and some of those 2003 numbers were some of my friends with a new job but lower wages. But now every one of them is making more than they did when they lost their job in 2001. And everyone else is making more money than they did at any point along the way.

Dave2, I still get the feeling that the economists who get published / quoted are the ones who happen to either A) agree with a liberal bent or B) helps sell papers. I can’t prove it, though. When was the last time an economist was quoted for a major paper and it had good news?

And regarding stimulus payment, I still haven’t decided if ours will go to “bad decisions” like paying off debt or saving or “good decisions” like spending it like a drunken sailor in an electronics show. Please don’t ask me to explain this analogy.

re: the begbar, what’s really horrible is I’ve been so busy working my job to earn money for people who didn’t earn it, I haven’t updated it! I still have my lolcat beg up there and it expired a week or two ago, and I don’t have the Fantastic Journey petition on there. Once I finish paying for everyone else in the country, I’ll be able to spend some time on my own things.

Everyone you know is making more? Where do you live? and is there room for more? I know a good number of people that are making more than they did in 2001 as well… but it’s not everyone I know. And the extra cash didn’t just fall into their lap. They really had to make efforts to find/switch jobs or they worked for a company that happened to do well. But overall, even those that make more, they still are paying more for goods and services. It’s just that it doesn’t hurt as much as it does for those that make less.

Regardless of how many people make more, the economy is in a downturn. That should be obvious to everyone, not just the people that make less than they used to.

martymankinss last blog post..Scooter Sunday #3

When was the last time an economist was quoted for a major paper and it had good news?

How about when there was actually good news to report! Like when Clinton was in office and the United States of America had the longest economic expansion in U.S. history.

Dave2s last blog post..TequilaQ

I am going to have to come back after my allergist appointment, because I need to write a book here.

Absurdists last blog post..Mother’s Day Part III: Honoring Wonderful Mothers

martymankins, actually, I left out one exception - Absurdist. She’s someone I know who doesn’t fit into that category, as her blog postings will also let you know.

Dave2, I thought there was good news in 2003, 2004, etc with all the job creation?

Abs, your book is welcome. Just be sure to copy your composition to the clipboard because I’d hate for you to write it, click “say it” and it get lost (which happens sometimes to me on long comments). In fact, you should write it in notepad/vim/word and paste it in when ready. And I’m sorry I left you out of my “everyone I know” statements.