Why do people think the economy is good?

It's definitely not good.

 

That is, of course, not true. PT jobs for economic reasons have DECLINED since the ACA was passed!!!!! The increase in PT jobs was for workers who ONLY want to work PT, like Boomers who want to cut their hours once they start receiving their SS benefits.

 

I think that the unemployment figure is being used too strongly to judge the strength of the economy. And I think that the amount of people who have quit looking for work is not being understood to be a very large part of the reason that the unemployment figure looks low.

My impression is that correcting for that, we would see that unemployment is no better than 7 or maybe even 8%.

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Where's your proof, of course, that that is not true?

Thank you. Oh, and no liberal-leaning sources. Must be neutral.

 

You can thank the Obstruct and Blame Republicans for this. If they allowed Obama to be a Keynesian like they did Reagan and Bush... the economy would be booming right now.

 

You never fail to entertain!

 

Sometimes the best entertainment is the truth!

 

That's true!



But sometimes it's your posts.

 

Sometimes it's like trying to tell a child Santa doesn't exist. They will laugh at you because they don't know any better.

 

The dollar is stronger than it's been in a while and fuel is cheaper than its been a while. In an economy where pretty much everything is imported that make a difference in consumer confidence.

Everything is interrelated and the overall trend is positive.

 

The uninformed believe the economy is in recovery because the media they watch tells them so. They simply believe what they are told.....reality does not enter into the equation

 

I was thinking something similar! Your post did seem to have a wide eyed, child like, gullibility that frankly, was rather endearing.

 

The numbers are always artificially inflated. People are just more atune to that right now because of QE.

 

if this was the economy under Clinton it would be bad, but compared to the Bush economy it is good, were still recovering

 

is the economy better or worse off then when Obama took office.... the answer is better off, so that answers it

.

 

It is much worse off. It looks better on the outside, but the "recovery" in the jobs sector went towards low-wage un-skilled, part time temp jobs largely. The middle class has been decimated and continues to be decimated. I'm not pinning the blame on Obama though, this structural shift in the middle class was a long time in the making.

 

The poster I replied to provided no proof, why did you not demand proof from them????
Obviously you knew they were wrong.

There were 9,233,000 working PT for economic reasons when Obamacare was signed and there are 6,790,000 now.

http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab8.htm

 

The Right depends on "FEELINGS" rather than actual data. There are less than 1 million workers who have given up looking for work, the BLS keeps track of the number and also calculated the UE rate including them. It is called the U-4 rate and is 6.0%

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

 

Really...'Better' as in down 5 million jobs the government said we should have by this time? Better as in more folk leaving the work force than are finding jobs every monthfor years? Better as in lower wages and higher medical costs? Or perhaps 'better' in haqving an incompetent running our foreign policy?

 

Nothing in your entire rant has much basis in fact.

"Down 5 million jobs from what the government said we should have"? Not much of a metric, unless you think governments can precisely predict the future. And depending on when such a government prediction was made, completely worthless.

"More folks leaving the work force than finding jobs?" That's a trend that has been going on for more than a decade (workforce participation peaked in 2000), and has a lot to do with the aging baby boomer generation. Indeed, workforce participation rates under Obama are roughly the same as they were under Reagan. Was Reagan a terrible president, too?

"Lower wages"? Nonsense. Go to the following and link, look for Table H-3, and click on "All Races":
https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/

The Census spreadsheet you get lets you compare median income by quintile in current dollars. Here's what they show:


QUINTILE_______2008__________2013

Lowest_________$11,656_______$11,651
Second________$29,517_______$30,509
Third__________$50,132_______$52,322
Fourth_________$79,760_______$83,519
Fifth___________$171,057______$185,206
Top 5%_________$294,709______$322,343

As you can see, overall median wages are up. They have been largely static for the lowest income households, with the bulk of the income gains going to the top 20% and in particular the top 5%. That's due to our growing wealth inequality, which in turn is due to tax rules that favor the wealthy, efforts to gut unions, the erosion of our safety net, etc. That's a real concern. Unfortunately, conservatives generally oppose any and all efforts to deal with it -- and indeed, their solution to everything is "more tax cuts for the wealthy", which just makes the inequality worse.

"Higher health care costs"? Health-care costs have been rising for decades, again driven by our aging Baby Boomer population. But thanks in part to Obamacare, in recent years they have been rising at the slowest rate in forever. Naturally, conservatives oppose Obamacare, as they seem to oppose anything that actually addresses the problems they try to blame Obama for.

 

Sorry son, but my rant is simply reality distilled. You can believe what you want. Heck, some poor fools actually think Obama is competent! As I am posting from a phone, I'm not in the cut/paste/research mode. Believe what you want. I simply know better.

 

You do understand what method they use to calculate this data? This is performed by surveys on x amount of households that are called.

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depending on surveys does not produce the correct data.

 

Yeah, feelings are more reliable than actual data from a survey of 60,000 households, over 100,000 individuals!!!!!