It's the Economy, Stupid!

[shunyadragon]

Read the thread. We've covered that already.

This does not reflect your responses. The evidence indicates the greater recovery was under the Obama administration and the economy was not stagnant.

[shunyadragon]

I had no idea what the weather was in your area, Shuny - it was simply a friendly question. The point of my post was..... how likely is it that you'll get snow for Christmas.

That's all.

Post me directly with personal questions. The thread topic is the thread topic.

[Cow Poke]

Post me directly with personal questions. The thread topic is the thread topic.

wow

Sorry I asked.

Regardless - Have a Merry Christmas.

[seanD]

Ask the source. The main issue was the drop of unemployment and other economic indicators in the Obama administration in response to the assertions that the economy was stagnant under the Obama administration. Under Trump all you see is a natural extinction of the trends of the Obama Administration and the natural economic growth beyond that, and of course beyond that the rich got amazing ly richer and the national debt increased at rate greater than in the past.

Depends on what your definition of "stagnant" is. Like I said earlier, relative to what amount of debt that was incurred, the expansion of government, and the amount of money that was pumped (and still is being pumped) into the system by the central bank only to get a less than 3% annual gdp number to me is pretty stagnant. But I agree that nothing has changed much from Obama to Trump, including ever increasing debt.

[lilpixieofterror]

Damn right. The continuation of Democracy is more important than the temporary state of the economy.

See above.

[Teallaura]

wow

Sorry I asked.

Regardless - Have a Merry Christmas.

Don't take it personally - he attacks indiscriminately when he gets defensive.

[Leonhard]

You are still misunderstanding the issue.

Demi, if you loan 50000$ to a start-up company, do you expect it to be paid back by the end of the year?

The whole deal with federal loans is that they're basically just an investment in the American economy. They only become a problem when the GDP to debt ratio keeps growing, which it has through Bush, Obama and now Trump. Growing the debt to gdp ratio has been popular among US presidents ever since Reagan began doing it. Only Clinton's presidency saw a decrease.

There's a limit to how long you can keep growing that ratio, as at some point it becomes unlikely that a country could ever keep paying it back.



Strictly speaking though, a country can keep borrowing money for all eternity as long as its debt to gdp remains constant.

[Leonhard]

Yes, if you sift the data enough, you can eventually produce the result you want.

As long as you keep denying that people are living longer, while retiring at the same age, and this results in a general downward trend (visible in all western countries), then you're actually guilty of this. If you want to measure the impact of the economy you have to select those who are not retirement age.

Which is what I did.

[Leonhard]

It's a moot point anyway. It doesn't matter how many jobs are (supposedly) being created if they're low wage, thus because of this and rising inflation, folks are not only not saving, but incurring personal debt. These were some of the same things (minus the inflation) happening under Obama's "recovery," which Trump rightly pointed out before he got elected.

I will say that's it good to see the middle class's wages increasing under Trump if anything has been flatlined its that and for decades.

[Sparko]

You can play with charts all you want. I can only speak as to my own situation.

In the three years since Trump took office, my 401K has nearly doubled in value. Part of that is because of the stock market doing so well, and partly because I have gotten very nice raises over the last three years allowing me to put more into my 401K, and my company has made large profit sharing deposits into my 401K too because they have done so well.

The last year under Obama, I had lost 6% of my 401K's value.

Under Obama, gas and grocery prices were rising like crazy. Now they are steady. Gas has held around $2.50/gal for the last 3 years (about $1/gal less than under Obama). My grocery bill is pretty steady also. So income is up, prices are steady. To me that means more buying power.

Yay Trump.

Guess who I am voting for in 2020? Go on, guess.

[Juvenal]

Guess who I am voting for in 2020? Go on, guess.

The guy who pays off porn stars?

[Teallaura]

The guy who pays off porn stars?

Bill can't run again...

[Cow Poke]

The guy who pays off porn stars?

Serous question. Is anybody alleging that he's continuing to do that, or has done that since being elected?

[MaxVel]

I went to Senegal with my buddy, who'd made a friend of Afia Loum, the brother of the prime minister at the time. Afia went to American University in DC, where he met my buddy because they were both learning finance. Afia needed to know finance because he was the finance minister. The whole country works like that. Offered me a job professin' at the university in Dakar. Thought hard about taking it, too.

Anyway, it was a formal visit, the kind where if you leave before you've stayed a full four weeks, it's a deadly insult to your host, so I had time to learn way too much about what they buy and how they pay for it. They don't really have an economy. They live on foreign aid. The biggest revenue source is the , LoNaSe. Just so happens I've still got the t-shirt.

One of the things they bought using foreign aid from us and other places, mostly France, was a railroad to cross the country. It gets really hot in the interior, and then really wet during the rainy season. Really hot followed by really wet doesn't do anything good for a railroad. So now they have a rotting railroad crossing the country.

Another fun fact.

I saw a map of Senegal, once. I was peeking in the window of Our President's office, and he had a book - an atlas! - open on the Desk. The guards caught me peeking, and (quite rightly) told me not to get ideas above my station. I went back to my work, planting bananas. But boy did I have a story to tell my friends!

[demi-conservative]

Demi, if you loan 50000$ to a start-up company, do you expect it to be paid back by the end of the year?

The whole deal with federal loans is that they're basically just an investment in the American economy. They only become a problem when the GDP to debt ratio keeps growing, which it has through Bush, Obama and now Trump. Growing the debt to gdp ratio has been popular among US presidents ever since Reagan began doing it. Only Clinton's presidency saw a decrease.

There's a limit to how long you can keep growing that ratio, as at some point it becomes unlikely that a country could ever keep paying it back.

Stop parroting the same nonsense. No one is expecting the debt to be repaid quickly, the point that you are still dodging is that GDP is not the balance sheet and is therefore useless. Would you judge a company by its income without looking at its balance sheet?

Do you admit that if government borrowing for spending was 1 trillion higher in 2010, the GDP would be about 1 trillion higher?

Strictly speaking though, a country can keep borrowing money for all eternity as long as its debt to gdp remains constant.

Who are you parroting, Krugman or some other website author you've read?