How bad is the economy ?

[.... callchet ....]

How bad is it in the USA ? I saw the President and First Lady talking to some school kids on TV this morning. Very light hearted and jovial. He looked very confident and self assured. My impression from that is "he has it handled and under control". I am going to spend some time trying to look at it from his perspective. Trying to see what he can actually do.

[lib2DaBone]

1. Stimulus won't hit economy until Sept 2010 !

I hope you are correct. I'm trying to do the same thing.

Read today where all these tax cuts and stimulus won't hit the economy until sept 2010. (I have to pay my light bill this week.. they wont wait until 2010)

I noticed in the stimulus bill a lot of blank checks for "Homeland security, State Department, Department of Defense",etc. Rebuilding the National Mall and giving Federal Employees Hybrid Cars to drive is good for people living and working in Washington, D.C., but there are 49 other States out there with workers in need?

I'm not criticizing Obama in any way... I believe he knows what he is doing... but I gotta say... this stimulus package looks like "business as usual"

---------------------------------------------------------

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides $888 billion in investments and tax cuts. Of this total, $694 billion will enter the economy by the end of Fiscal year 2010, meaning that 78 percent of the monies allocated will reach the American people by September 30, 2010, providing an immediate boost to the overall economy and creating an estimated four million jobs.

[KharmaTrain]

2. This Is Gonna Take Some Time

You don't unravel 30 years of financial neglect in this country in 2 weeks or three months or even a year. The more I look at it, the more I see a need for big government investment and spending, but done in measured and judicious ways. This is where I have my confidence in President Obama.

The first step is to stabilize the economy...keep people from losing jobs and homes and get the banks solvent again. It's isolating the "toxic" from the good and starting cash to flow throughout the economy again. Next is the real stimulus...to help create jobs and a new business infrastructure to this country. It's making loans and tax breaks available to small businesses to create competition and jobs. It's seeding new technology and industry to fix long term national needs that provides the infrastructure to make sure the recovery endures. That problem will be how much to spend and to whom? But that's still a ways down the road...let's just get the economy stable first...and let's see how it's done.

Cheers...

[Winterblues]

4. Just eight years ago

We had a surplus. President Clinton oversaw the creation of 22 million new jobs and we had experienced "The Greatest Economic Expansion in History" They had shut off the National Debt Clock and we were actually paying down the Debt. We had experienced eight years of Peace and Posperity and Consumer Confidence was at it's highest point in three decades. I don't know where your thirty year number came from but it simply is not accurate.

[Deja Q]

8. Yet we were still 6 Trillion in debt, in 2000.

Was it a real surplus?

In terms of the national debt, it has been just about a 30 year issue -- in terms of big numbers; even in 1992, it's almost fun watching shows where the character laments the US has "a three trillion dollar debt". That's nothing.

[.... callchet ....]

11. I always thought when they said we had a budget surplus it meant we were out of debt.

Does it mean that we are just paying our bills ?

[jobendorfer]

14. debt vs deficit

If I get this wrong, doubtlessly a cheerful and pleasant economist will straighten me out :-)

What Clinton did was zero the _deficit_. A deficit occurs when the government spends more money than it takes in from taxation,
in a given year (or budget cycle).

The _debt_, on the other hand, is the long-term debt of the government, i.e., the accumulation of annual deficits. This number is much, much larger than an annual deficit, because we have been running deficits for so long.

Clinton managed to bring government spending and the tax collection process into balance, and then into surplus ( the government was collecting more revenue than it spent. ) However, it would take many, many years of surpluses to pay down the federal debt. I am not sure what the federal debt is at this writing, and probably don't want to know as it would just further depress me.

Obligatory joke: the physicist Richard Feynman used to introduce exponential notation (how mathematicians and scientists represent very, very large numbers) by saying, "We used to call these 'astronomical numbers'. Now we just call them 'budgetary numbers'."

J.

[.... callchet ....]

12. Reality Check

I am such a died in the wool lifelong democrat, that I had aways thought of the surplus under Clinton meaning that we had paid down our debt to zero. I am just learning today that there still was about a 5.5 T debt.

[Winterblues]

15. No one that I am aware of EVER said the Debt was paid off

Only that the last two years we were not running Deficits and we were actually beginning to pay down the Debt. By surplus we mean that our annual Budget was not in Deficit. Every Single Republican in Lock-Step in 1993 voted against the Clinton Budget. They all Grandstanded just as they are doing now and spouted the exact same BS as they are now. You can't raise taxes during a recession and Government Spending does not ever help. Clinton's Budget was passed by the tie breaking vote of VP Al Gore and America went on to experience "The Greatest Economic Expansion in History" The very second the "War pResident" took office they decided to reverse everything Clinton and almost immediately America experienced "The Greatest Economic Turn Around in History" Long before 9-11 this was evident.

[.... callchet ....]

13. Duplicate

[KharmaTrain]

16. 30 Years Of "Deregulation"...

I am a big defender of the prosperity of the 90's...I benefitted from it. However it went on in an atmosphere of ongoing "deregulation" and the dismantling of the protections put in following the Depression that allowed banks to grow too big and lead to the abuses we saw over the past 8 years. I set the start of this "era" as fall-out of the high inflation days of the late 70's that helped the GOOP win big in 1980...and soon thereafter deregulation became the rage...let the "marketplace" decide.

Yes, there was a bit of a respite of expanding debt during the 90's, but there was no slowdown on "deregulation" that destroyed competition and turned the stock market into a gambling casino. We haven't had any serious trustbusting legislation in this country since the break-up of AT&T in the late 70's...the foxes have been running the henhouse ever since.

[L0oniX]

3. It's so bad here that the illegal aliens are leaving and going back home.

[sarcasmo]

5. I thought you might be from Michigan, west side here.

[L0oniX]

6. Florida ...all my profile info is bs n/t

[Lorien]

7. That's actually true. A friend of mine works for Homeland Security

and she says that there is hardly any immigration happening right now-many immirants are considering going back to their home countries! (These are legal immigrants, not illegals-just to be clear).

[.... callchet ....]

9. Who is your avatar image of ?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

10. It's bad and going to get a lot worse.

There simply aren't any quick fixes to the disaster. People are saving their money and not buying stuff because they're either broke or fear being broke. So, the people who produce the things that people would be buying aren't going to be producing stuff they can't sell. Which means more layoffs, which means more people not buying, which means more layoffs.

Which also means a lot more factories being closed down.

The "recovery" when it comes, won't be a return to the prosperity that we have known but a "leveling of the playing field" to our disadvantage.