Socialism Is Bad for the Environment

I'd be happy to see more recent data.

 

August 2018:
The biggest news in the August employment report was a sharp increase in pay. The average wage paid to American workers rose by 10 cents to $27.16 an hour. What’s more, the yearly rate of pay increases climbed to 2.9% from 2.7%, marking the highest level since June 2009.

What happened: White-collar professional firms filled 53,000 positions, bringing the total created over the past 12 months to more than half a million. These are the fastest growing jobs in the count.

U.S. adds 201,000 jobs as worker wages accelerate to nine-year high
==============

November 2018:
Wages and salaries jump by 3.1%, highest level in a decade

Wages and salaries rose 3.1 percent in the third quarter, the biggest increase in a decade, according to the Labor Department.

Wage increases have been the missing link in the economy since the recovery began in mid-2008. Average hourly earnings have been rising steadily but have stayed below the 3 percent level as slack has remained in the labor market.

However the unemployment rate is now at 3.7 percent, the lowest since 1969, and wage pressures have begun to build. The Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates in an effort to stave off future inflationary pressures, though the central bank’s preferred gauge of inflation rose just 2.5 percent in the third quarter, including a 1.9 percent increase for health benefits.

Wages and salaries jump by 3.1%, highest level in a decade
================

February 2019
Worker paychecks are showing their biggest gains since the recovery began a decade ago, and are more than keeping up with inflation.

Labor Department numbers released Wednesday show that real average hourly earnings, which compare the nominal rise in wages with the cost of living, rose 1.7 percent in January on a year-over-year basis.

Worker wage gains are keeping up with inflation, and then some
================

March 2019
Hourly pay earned by the typical employee rose sharply in February, pushing the increase in wages over the past year to a 10-year high of 3.4%.

The last time wages grew that fast was in early 2009.
At a 10-year high, wage growth for American workers likely to keep accelerating
==========

And from the NY Times...

May 2019
Average hourly earnings in April were 3.2 percent higher than a year earlier, the ninth straight month in which growth topped 3 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The recent gains are going to those who need it most. Over the past year, low-wage workers have experienced the fastest pay increases, a shift from earlier in the recovery, when wage growth was concentrated at the top.

Why Wages Are Finally Rising, 10 Years After the Recession
=======

So there you have it.
August 2018: Wage gains highest in a decade
November 2018: Wage gains highest in a decade
February 2019: Wage gains highest in a decade
March 2019: Wage gains highest in a decade

Gee....wage gains keep getting better and better as time goes on after the tax cuts went into effect. The last time they were this good was in "early 2009" or before Obama had done anything. So basically wage increases are better than they ever were under any Obama policies.

 

Remember Bush's "Great Recession?" That was responsible for the large downturn. Obama guided the recovery from a very dangerous point. It has continued but not that strong. Trump claims there will be a stock market crash if he isn't reelected in 2020. I think that happens whether or not he is reelected.

 

Obama exacerbated the recession. Under Obama, the economy suffered. Unemployment skyrocketed and the Food Stamp rolls ballooned. He over-regulated the private business sector to the point that starting businesses, and in some cases, keeping businesses open was very difficult, if not impossible. Obama signed a stimulus bill of $8 Hundred Billion and it went nowhere. It did nothing to help the economy at all.

Obama's GDP never got above 2.5% which is a miserable showing the entire 8 years. Many times our GDP was under 2% and we were told to accept it as the "new normal." On average for 8 years, Obama GDP was about 1/6% or so. That does not jive with any claim that he guided anything that looked remotely like a recovery.

The only REAL recovery is what we have seen since we don't have a Marxist in the White House. Trump rolled back Obama era policies. He has all but completely dismantled Obama's policies and we have achieved far more than Obama did in terms of record-breaking unemployment and historic tax cuts and explosive job growth not EVER seen in all 8 of the Obama years.

As for the stock market crash... It will be blamed on Trump, but it won't be his fault. The market was going crash no matter who had been elected. It has been headed for a disaster long before he got elected and even if he is elected again. It makes no difference. It's not the fault of Obama, Trump or any other president. The Federal Reserve is to blame and they operate independently of the White House. They are not controlled by any president or any political body. They really don't answer to anyone. Look at the Fed. Res. if you want know why the stock market will eventually go belly up.

 

US economy under Obama 2009-2017 | Economics Help

Barack Obama served as President from Jan 2009 – Jan 2017. When Obama came to office in Jan 2009, the US economy was in a deep recession, with falling real GDP, high unemployment and rising levels of government borrowing.

As President, Obama oversaw a moderate fiscal expansion which helped to promote economic recovery and falling unemployment. Given the depth of the 2009 recession, some argue the recovery was relatively weak. But, compared to the Eurozone, the US economy performed relatively well, with unemployment falling to pre-recession levels. However, despite a prolonged economic recovery, the US recovery was unevenly distributed. Median wages barely rose, and this compares to a booming stock market and rising corporate profit levels.

 

Here is some advice you gave to Hank D. on December 26th. This was just TWO DAYS after the Dow Jones reached it's most recent lowest point of 21,792 on December 24, 2018.

The Dow closed at 26,112 today. By telling someone to sell all their stock back on December 26th (Dow closed at 22,878 on the 26th) they would have missed out on a 14.1% gain over those 24 weeks. That is an annualized return of 30.6%.

Sell low. Real nice advice there.

 

So, just ignore months and months of data showing wages rising at the fastest levels in ten years and attack Bush and Trump for something that is off topic.

 

None of that takes into account the real unemployment rate. The only ones benefiting from the recovery at that time was the very 1% that Obama and others constantly condemned. There was NO economic recovery. When your average annual GDP is 1.6%, you cannot claim an economic recovery. Sorry, but your claims don't match up to reality.

And there was no falling unemployment. Unemployment increased under Obama. The real unemployment Food Stamp rolls increased, and more and more people were living on unemployment benefits. In Obama's 2nd term the real unemployment rose to 17%. That was a staggering number then and still is. Your claims are simply not based on truth or reality. You really don't know what you're talking about. And constantly appealing to nothing but liberal rags, isn't doing you any good.

 

Liberals can't face facts when it comes to the real numbers. It's why they always run back to outdated articles that don't reflect the present reality on the ground. They cannot argue with an economy that has made positive, historic gains that THEY said would never happen.

 

I got back in after Jan. 1. This rally is way overextended but it is hard to time when it finally goes down. Yes that wasn't a good call.

 

Forget about Bush's Great Recession? Obama led us to a recovery from what was almost a depression.

 

What I see here is that the Democrat's Kennedy, John, and Clinton did better than any of the Republicans and Carter was just under Reagan.

 

Yes, the slowest and most anemic recovery ever, and his stimulus program doubled the national debt.

 

Doesn't this make you feel foolish?

 

As In said, this came very close to being a depression. Can't you understand that?

 

I understand that the recession of 1981-1982 was worse than the recession of 2008-2009. I understand that Reagan's recovery was much faster, sharper, and better than Obama's.

 

Why would it? Obama's GDP growth was an average of 1.4% over 8 years. That is a lousy record. He spent $800 billion on his hand picked programs to stimulate the economy. It's a lousy record.

 

The Severity of the Great Recession

Kevin J. Lansing of the San Francisco Fed offer some graphs that illustrate the severity of the Great Recession: one compares the decline in real household consumption per person in the 2007-2009 recession to the recessions of 2001 and 1990-91; another compares the decline in real household net worth per person in these three recessions.

Lansing offers an additional figure worth contemplating: the change in the employment/population ratio since 1988. The unemployment rate has some well-known difficulties as a measure of the employment situation: for example, "discouraged" workers who have given up looking for jobs are not counted as officially unemployed, but rather as out of the labor force.

But the employment/population ratio is just based on dividing two numbers--employment and population. The shaded areas in the figure show periods of recession, when the employment/population ratio does tend to fall.

But the decline in the employment/population ratio in this recession is enormous: 5.2 percentage points over four and a half years: from 63.4% in December 2006 to 58.2% in June 2011. Back in the grim double-dip recession of the early 1980's, for comparison, the employment/population ratio fell 3 percentage points over a bit more than three years, from 60.1% in December 1979 to 57.1% in March 1983.

These enormous declines in consumption and in asset values and the loss of jobs, of course, help to explain why the economic "recovery" is sometimes being called the Long Slump. The pattern also offers some background as to why the federal budget talks seem so intractable: when a recession dents the economy this badly, passions are going to run high.