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Have a nice day!

Can I get a smile with that

Jihadin wrote:

Have a nice day!

Can I get a smile with that

Anything for you!

Cheers!

Melissia wrote:Yes. That doesn't mean it is logical either way.

Frazzled wrote:The Presdient can't "create jobs." However his policies and the entities he manages sure as hell can kill jobs.

So can congress-- in fact, they can directly kill jobs through defunding organizations.

And they have, as have many state governments.

We've haven't lost near enough public sector jobs.

Corrected your typo.

Melissia wrote:Actually, the bad economy was one of the reasons that the Democrats were elected, along with the rush to get away from everything Bush.

Selective memory is bad for your sanity, Phanatik.

Can you provide some sort of... I dont' know.. fact to support this claim?

The major indices, like the DOW, S&P, were consistently up in consecutive years from 2003 until 2007 (so we were in the midst of a general economic rally during the 2006 elections), consumer confidence was generally trending higher, and unemployment was at 4%, trending lower.

If the economy was bad in '06, nobody seems to have told it.

Hm, I was thinking of the 2009 financial scandals.

Of coruse, the huge Republican-created federal deficits certainly didn't help them.

Frazzled wrote:

Melissia wrote:Yes. That doesn't mean it is logical either way.

Frazzled wrote:The Presdient can't "create jobs." However his policies and the entities he manages sure as hell can kill jobs.

So can congress-- in fact, they can directly kill jobs through defunding organizations.

And they have, as have many state governments.

We've haven't lost near enough public sector jobs.

Corrected your typo.

What do you classify as public sector jobs, as in do you think we should continue the mass reduction is teachers, firefighters, police force, publicly funded construction, road work etc.

Melissia wrote:Hm, I was thinking of the 2009 financial scandals.

Of coruse, the huge Republican-created federal deficits certainly didn't help them.

So if the Republican deficits were "huge," than the Obama deficits are humongous.

Obama makes the worst spenders in history look like pikers.

But who is surprised?

G'day

Phanatik wrote:
Actually, the recession started in late 2007.

And, strangely enough, many Democrats were elected in 2008.

Phanatik wrote:
The democrats gained control in 2006...

No they didn't. A majority in the House, equal standing in the Senate, and a GOP President is not Democratic control.

Unless you're also arguing that the Republicans are presently in control.

Melissia wrote:Well that, and many of them just don't care, not really seeing Palestinians as people.

They're more or less the same thing, really.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Frazzled wrote:Wrong. Jobs are what matters. If there were a decent Republican candidate Obama would be down 20 points now.

In terms of the impact on politics, then yeah, jobs and the vague idea of expecting more jobs in the future matter.

But in terms of the original issue of whether or not the US is in recession, then the only thing that matters is stats, and the statistical definition. A recession is in a observation on GDP, which is a statistic. The only useful way to describe that is with an agreed definition such as 'two or more quarters of negative growth'.

Melissia wrote:Pelosi is pretty much right, though.

The only reason most evangelicals want to defend Israel is that they hope that Israelis will cause the Rapture to happen early somehow.

to be fair, it has been a long wait.

Frazzled wrote:

You have a job now.

I actually have 2. And my own training book that I work on when I have time, which is often given that 90% of both my formal jobs consists of compiling and analyzing data.

The vast majority of people in the US also have jobs, and can expect to in the future. The people that don't, and can't, are clearly just human detritus being weeded out by a push for efficiency.

Frazzled wrote:
We'll see in the election if it matters won't we.

Indeed we will.

Phanatik wrote:And everyone knows that the U.S. economy was depressed after the democrats took control of both houses of Congress after the mid-term elections 2006.

Yeah, because the GFC was totally because Democratic initiatives undertaken in the two years from 2006 to 2008, and had nothing to do with a series of initiatives dating back into the 1990s, supported by both sides of congress and mirrored by similar reforms by political parties across the world.

Just... stop being silly.

And the smoking gun for the financial crisis was the democrat program of selling houses to people that couldn't afford them.

First of all, the Democrat plan removed the restriction on who banks could lend to. Every loan given out was the choice of that bank, no government person was telling them they had to lend the money. A central plank of right wing thought is that all companies will act in their own rational self interest, and only lend to parties with a reasonable expectation of repaying the debt. Of course, that didn't happen. Banks accepted incredible levels of leverage, and exposed themselves to complex financial derivatives with exposures they admitted they didn't fully understand. At the same time they loaned money to people for grossly overvalued homes, that the lendee had no chance of repaying, because those banks had become hooked on a game of on-selling those loans as CDOs to financial institutions.

When that whole game of cards comes crashing dow, we saw a 5% decline in worldwide GDP. A collection of liars and idiots who don't like to consider the plain and basic truth that capitalist economic structures, like any economic structures, can at times produce negative results looked at that collapse and figured it was easiest to blame the whole thing on some Americans who were given loans for houses they couldn't afford, and ignore the fact that those losses would have been easily consumed by a financial system with a decent level of leverage.

And they were right to happily tell that silly story, because you and thousands of others had no interest in studying and beginning some serious thinking about modern financial structures, and so you'd happily accept a silly story that blamed some poor people for taking out a loan.

sebster wrote:

Phanatik wrote:

And the smoking gun for the financial crisis was the democrat program of selling houses to people that couldn't afford them.

First of all, the Democrat plan removed the restriction on who banks could lend to. Every loan given out was the choice of that bank, no government person was telling them they had to lend the money.

I can tell that you've spent time thinking about this and believe it, but you're largely omitting the role that HUD played in setting essentially a 'quota' for lendership that created an opportunity space for increased-risk programs (predatory lending), which gained significant market share all through the 2000s. That, in and of itself could have been regulated, but GSEs (like Fannie Mae) were benefitting from huge balance sheet write-ups from a one-time refinancing (flat fee) event that inflated their earnings drastically.

That was the tipping point when those GSEs could have said 'hey, nice, but there is a problem looming that the world should know about with regard to mortgage-backed securities and increased risk in real estate and the lendee pool'. Instead, they knew the only way to maintain high earnings was to increase their volume, which meant that they had to drop their requirements to the level of the more aggressive private lenders. Then the boom in foreclosures, then the bubble, then the crisis.

Unless the Federal National Mortgate Association and the National Housing Act were giant Republican conspiracies, and unless Clinton pressuring Fannie Mae to expand its pool and make more lending available to lower income/higher risk lendees was somehow Bush's fault, Democrats played a huge role in the events leading to the housing bubble and collapse.

I like how this has been reduced to "Democrat v. Republican."

Its great how we want to pass blame, while whining about "politicians."

I don't get what the big deal is over the US constitution.

It was written hundreds of years ago. Being bound by an inflexible ancient document that tells you what you can and can't do and that hasn't been updated for a long time sounds like a bad idea.

Another reason I don't follow the Bible or any other religious document.

Actually it is kind of flexible. It's a remarkably short document all things considered.

Oh.

Ok.

But still, why do people get so angry when someone does something not within the laws of the constitution? Heck, the guy makes the rules.

Squigsquasher wrote:But still, why do people get so angry when someone does something not within the laws of the constitution? Heck, the guy makes the rules.

Mostly because the constitution sets aside several important rights that people have, which the government is not supposed to go against.

For example, the government is restricted from choosing an official church or religion; similarly, the constitution makes slavery illegal in all US territories and prevents state governments from trying to legalize it on their own. The fourteenth amendment also states that all people are supposed to be treated equal under the eyes of hte law.

It is very possible to change the constitution. But it takes a lot of effort. Homophobes, such as Ron Paul, have been trying to put a constitutional amendment restricting all states from allowing gay marriage, but have thus far failed.

Hmm. Fair enough.

sourclams wrote:Unless the Federal National Mortgate Association and the National Housing Act were giant Republican conspiracies, and unless Clinton pressuring Fannie Mae to expand its pool and make more lending available to lower income/higher risk lendees was somehow Bush's fault, Democrats played a huge role in the events leading to the housing bubble and collapse.

I don't think you read my post that closely. Yes, Democrats played a significant part in the financial collapse. So did the Republicans, and so did corporate structures and culture, and all of this went on long before Bush ever even considered running for politics. It all led back to largely undebated, unconsidered policies embraced not just by both sides of US politics but by political parties around the world, and by business as a whole as well.

I am not, in any way, shape or form saying it was Bush's fault, as most of the key decisions were made long before he even thought of running for political office.

I am, however, saying that is absolutely idiotic of Phanatik to make noise blaming this issue on Democrats alone, especially on trying to blame in on the Democratic majority in 2006-2008. The problems are drawn from the laissez faire principals embraced by almost every major political party in the world from the mid-90s onwards - in particular the idea that you can remove lending restrictions from a bank and just assume that bank will operated in a rational, self-preserving manner. Any studied look into agency theory, and some reading on the difficulties modern financial institutions are having in understanding the complexity of modern financial derivatives their traders are engaging in will tell that assumption is very dubious, even without the evidence of the GFC.

The real problem now is that there's been very little substantial debate to address the fact that everyone got it very wrong and that we really need to consider the basic foundations of our the economic assumptions mainstream politics is built around. Instead we get stupid noise "your side did it!" "no your side did it!" as we all line up to build another house of cards.