The GOP eats itself on fiscal mattersFollow

Because no one was employed building those houses that people couldn't really afford to buy, amirite? Or employed by the shady mortgage brokers, or in anything in anyway connected to real estate? And all those people spending money they didn't have didn't create more jobs for Starbucks barristas, either, right?

Edited, Aug 5th 2011 2:44pm by Olorinus

goatse is responsible for the economic crash.

Funny how everyone understands but you. Almost as though, for some strange reason, you're not actually trying

lolirony

The fact that NA has been shedding manufacturing jobs for more than a decade doesn't mean that the loss of manufacturing in NA is not a part of the larger unemployment picture.

If public healthcare is, as you state, the fundamental reason why America is floundering in the face of the housing bubble popping, then why did Canada whether the "recession" so much better than America? We have a nearly 100% public healthcare system. If public healthcare is such an anathema to business, then why doesn't Canada have the same unemployment and debt problems that are plaguing the US?

Do you really think our banks are better? smarter? (insert-adjective-here?)

Cause they aren't.

Are we taxed lower? I bet you that my six-pack cost more than yours.

I grew up in a lumber processing town. When I was a kid there was two sawmills running full bore all the time. During the housing bubble - when people were buying houses in America on a wish and a prayer - guess what? Both the mills in my hometown shut down.

First they sent the fibre to the interior - to a larger sawmill that took logs from all over the province. Now they are sent to China. According to the most recent stats out, raw log exports last year were twice as high as the year before, and are set to double again this year. This is touted as "progress" - as our government is letting logging trucks speed away with a full load of lumber - taxed less than 10 dollars.

A couple years back was the first year that our ministry of forests no longer paid for itself.

Yet massive amounts of logs still leave our forests every year.

We used to have laws that said that where you cut the timber, you processed the timber. If you didn't want to process lumber in Hazelton, you left the forest alone in Hazelton.

We get less money from the forests in taxes every year - we are just about paying companies to take our wood. Yet, there are fewer jobs in forestry, even as the logs leave our shores.

You're nuts if you think that we can race to the bottom hard enough to convince the wealth owners to "invest" in us.

Unless you are advocating that the way to solve america's unemployment problem is to adopt the labour laws China employs.

Be careful, a lot of people can't read sarcasm or intentional irony in text.

Translation for Gbaji et al: It was the out-sourcing that did in the jobs.

Trying to hang on to old technologies in the face of change is insane. Trying to hang onto present jobs if business can get the work done cheaper elsewhere is a losing game too. If you let the private economy change and grow on its own, what you'll find is that it is constantly wanting "new" workers. Developed nations need to forget about hanging onto bulk manufacturing, when the best and brightest want to live there, developing cutting edge content and processes.

White collar jobs are in medical and science research, Blue collar in Lab technicians and cleaners.
White collar writers, directors, actors, musicians, Blue collar copyists, roadies, technicians, data transferrers, forum mediators.
White Collar 5 star energy efficient house and office Architects, Blue collar builders
White collar CHP system designers, Blue Collar builders of CHP systems
White collar programmers, Blue Collar testers.
White collar agriculture inventors, engineers, biologists and chemists, Blue collar installers and shippers.

Where does someone who worked in a car or timber plant for 20 or 30 years fit in here? Obviously through new training or education. Instead of business having to "steal" the highly educated workers from the developing nations, why don't you give people a stable minimal safety net when they are unemployed, and then give them a stable system of free education, to fit them for the new jobs in the economy? Why hang on to old processes when there are newer, smarter, off-the-shelf technologies ready to go? If nations fitted themselves out with CHP systems, they'd get electricity and heating at a 10% discount, drop their energy production pollution by 70%, and have blue collar jobs coming out their ears for a few decades.

Which was essentially the issue. The manufacturing base (and other sectors really) were crumbling out from under the balloon economy of the 2000's and people refused to acknowledge or believe it. "Outsourcing? Not a problem! Hey, look at this 5% unemployment!". Wages stagnated, underemployment grew and nothing was actually built up for the economy to rest on once the bubble burst. The stock market was lower and unemployment higher when Bush left office than at the depth of the previous recession following the tech bubble and 9/11. There was no "Bush economy" except in the ephemeral sense.

It's ludicrous that people would refuse to believe this when we have the concrete evidence of an economy that was worse off post-bubble than it was in the previous recession -- what was built up in the meantime to absorb some of the crash? What sectors remained firm because they weren't reliant upon the bubble? Any? Any at all? What true growth was there?

The answer is obvious but... hey. Gotta keep those wagons circled.

A part of? Absolutely. However, I think a point that some of you are missing is that attempting to continue to hold on to older jobs is a mistake. We lose jobs all the time for any of a number of reasons. We need to make sure that new job creation accounts for those lost jobs. That's how you keep unemployment low. Job losses fluxuate, and certainly do increase during recessions, but the job losses in manufacturing have been steady for the last 30 years. There's nothing particularly new about this. Certainly not "within the last 5 years" new.



I didn't state that. I said it was one of the major factors. Also, I didn't say that "public health care" in principle was, but that the specific form of mandated health coverage levels via insurance mechanism which the latest round of health care reform foisted on the US public that was.




Because it's not about static conditions, but about changes. Canada didn't choose to change its health care system right in the middle of the global recession. You're forgetting that we're talking about relative effects. Canada already had that public health care system. Whatever economic adjustments it required have already occurred. Thus, they felt no *new* effects. Why would they? As I said above, they didn't change their system during this time period.

The US did. Right at a time when job losses are increasing due to recession, when you need to encourage new job creation to reverse the rising unemployment trend, the Democrats choose to pass legislation which effectively increased the cost of hiring people. Regardless of what you think about government's role in health care, it was incredibly bad timing to do so right then.


The reality is that the Democrats realized that they had a narrow window of time in which to pass the social legislation they wanted and made a decision to ignore the fact that the US was in the midst of an economic recession and passed them anyway. It was a timing issue. They knew there would be negative economic effects arising from those social agenda items. If the economy had been in good shape at the time, perhaps they could have managed these things without creating the disaster we're in right now. But it wasn't in good shape. They knew it wasn't in good shape. But they chose their social agenda over economic stability.


What's funny is that I'm not even saying they were wrong to do this. From their perspective, at least. To them, the social stuff is more important. The economy will eventually recover, but the social changes they've passed will likely stick with us for decades to come. For a progressive movement, that's what matters. The short term isn't important. If I were a liberal, I'd likely have chosen to do the exact same thing. But I do think it's important for the rest of us to acknowledge that this is what they did. They made that choice. They made it knowing it would cause significant near term economic problems. Blaming this on the GOP because they opposed the spending is I suppose the rhetoric the left has to at least try. But if you're all honest with yourselves, you know that it's just not true.

You've still failed to provide any evidence or even rational argument to support your claim that unemployment was somehow artificially lower than it should have been because of the housing bubble. And not even from the increased earnings of the financial institutions who invested in said bubble (which would at least make some sense), but somehow some other magical fairy-like effect that created employment but didn't involve those mean rich investment banks at all!


How about you start by at least making an attempt to support your claim first?

You mean your vague claim that the housing bubble created profits which in turn were invested into other jobs? The one I completely debunked in like my very first post on this subject? What part of me pointing out that the markets (excepting very recent events since the start of this thread) have more or less fully recovered did you miss? What part of us both presumably agreeing that the reason for our unemployment rate is because businesses aren't investing in ways which create jobs?


It's not because the money isn't there. It's because those with the money don't view employing people to be as profitable as they did just 5 years ago. And there is absolutely no possible logical way you can blame that on the housing bubble. It's nonsensical.





Funny how you fall back on this when you know you've lost the argument. Oh... But no one else thinks this matters! And no one else makes the same arguments you make! Never mind that I can't counter your arguments, let me just toss out my appeal to popularity fallacy and make it all go away. Yup. Predictable as hell.