Jobless rate drops to 4.7%
Economic Boom Continues
By Adam C Posted in Archived — Comments (23) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
The recent economic boom has continued through the summer despite high petroleum prices. With oil prices dropping, the last efforts of the MSM to portray the economy in a poor light are slipping away. So let's see how the WaPo is covering this:
Hiring perked up in August as employers added 128,000 jobs, pulling the unemployment rate down to 4.7 percent and flashing a Labor Day weekend message of an economic expansion that still has staying power.
The latest snapshot... should ease any fears that the expansion that began in late 2001 is in danger of fizzling out....
In June, employers boosted payrolls by 134,000 positions and in July they added another 121,000....
Over the 12 months ending August, wages grew by a strong 3.9 percent. The last time this figure was higher was in June 2001....
Oil prices, which surged to a record closing high of $77.03 in mid-July, have retreated some since then and are now hovering just above $70 a barrel.
Other recent economic reports suggest the economy's slowdown isn't as steep as some feared.
Mixed in, they find ways to claim the booming economy isn't so hot, but it's becoming harder for the MSM to downplay the successful economic policies of the Bush administration. At 4.7%, the jobless rate is well below the long run average and the accepted sustainable level. This is a strong sign of a strong economy which is full of workers earning a living rather than living off government. No wonder prognosticators on the left are saddened.
It is also notable that not many analysts would have predicted that the economy could grow this fast while oil prices were so high. Fortunately, our economy has diversified since the late 1970s and we are better able to weather the strain of high oil costs. Nevertheless, every drop in gas prices will pump the economy even more and will help Republicans win in the Fall.
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Jobless rate drops to 4.7% 23 Comments (0 topical, 23 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
Look at the way they smeared Honest Joe Wilson. Just a bunch of corporate lackys doing Rove's bidding.
This so-called "economy" is just a smokescreen to distract us from the fact Katrina was caused by global warming...
"What about housing going up, not being available, and the billions who are legally barred from seeing a doctor by President Bush and the Republican controlled Congress?"
BDS in full display. Bush is even keeping foreigners from seeing doctors.
LOL.
the new jobs figure was "less than analysts expected", which is another of their favorites. Of course these are the same reporters who would call a reduction in the increase of some program a "cut", so it's to be expected.
they are just at the peak of their inflation-adjusted normal cycle for the past 100 years, during which time they have ebbed and flowed as commodities do according to supply and demand.
in other words, get the horse before the cart.
oil prices are "high" because economic activity came first and created demand for oil. they are proof that the economy is indeed robust.
another thing...
a lot of these netroots/kos kids are good at their political computer games because they are independent contractors "telecomputing" from home. they are seeing and benefiting from growth in their own business opportunities because of the strong economy. many of them have entirely given up trying to bash the economy because they're doing so well themselves. the MSM know this.
The job creation numbers are low due to not accounting for the self-employed and the inflation numbers are artificially low because of a poor system and a retarded heuristics (sp?) system that misleads us. Both inflation and job creation numbers are much higher and we need them to be accurate in order to better judge and react to the economy. I will say though, that overall the economy is doing quite well at this time.
The household survey should cover those people just fine.
What makes you think our inflation measures are off though? Is this about gas? Nobody makes you use "core CPI" instead of the whole hting.
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.
Price inflation should not be adjusted because a computer today is better than a computer made yesterday, the bottomline cost should be what counts, as that is what people actually pay. Heuristics greatly affects the prices used for many things in the basket and should be eliminated (I believe it was started during Carter's term in office, but it may have been in early Reagan years). The basket itself also needs to be draqmatically adjusted, as I think it still even includes cigarettes when less that 25% of the population smokes. The healthcare part is all messed up as well.
Price inflation should not be adjusted because a computer today is better than a computer made yesterday, the bottomline cost should be what counts, as that is what people actually pay.
Um, how do you propose to factor in quality improvements then? The whole point of adjusting for quality is to eliminate quality bias.
In that they account for improvements to products and assign a dollar value to them. So if a regular 19" TV was going for $200 and this year the same 19" TV with a flat screen tube is still going for $200, that is a decrease in price by $x: where x is the value they assign to that flat screen tube upgrade.
The same goes for things like car options made standard (either by the company or through governmental regulation). You may have no choice but to buy the car with 2nd generation airbags, and the price will certainly increase because of that, but it may not be reflected in the CPI.
I believe that was what he was referring to.
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson
There are some places in the United States where high oil prices are causing a job boom. Lots of people are coming to Oklahoma because oil jobs are plentiful again.
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Eliminate the IRS and all payroll taxes! http://www.fairtax.org
As an Okie myself, I am well aware. Actually since we only have one vehicle and it is a hybrid, gas prices going up is probably a net gain for me personally. But I recognize the political reality that falling gas prices will help Rs in 2006.
To the most recent census report that "show" the numbers of people in poverty and without health care have risen since 2000. Too bad that those numbers are usually more affected by the previous president, who last time I checked, was a Democrat.
Blue Crabs are nice, but everyone knows they are best when they are bright RED!
http://www.house.gov/jec/middle/mobility/mobility.htm
excerpt:
Currently there are two models of the American economy, one static, and the other dynamic. The first portrays the United States as a caste system and misapplies the characteristics of a permanent income strata to those only temporarily moving through income brackets. The alternative view portrays a much more complex and interesting social reality in which the composition of income classes are in constant flux. According to this latter point of view, simplistic generalizations about actual persons and families (or "the rich" and "the poor") cannot be drawn from data on a conceptual artifice which does not exist as such in reality.
The empirical data support the view of the market economy as a dynamic and open society which provides opportunity to those who participate. There is no evidence of stagnation, with the turnover rate in the most stable quintile -- the top fifth -- exceeding 35 percent. The turnover rates in the bottom four quintiles were at least 60 percent over the period, with most of this reflecting upward progress. Analysis which assumes or suggests stable composition of family or household income quintiles rests on invalid assumptions. It makes no sense to draw sweeping conclusions such as "the income of the bottom 20 percent of families fell" in a 15-year period when most of the people originally in that category have long since improved their standard of living enough to have moved up from the bracket entirely.
Takeaway: "The poor" are not a class of people, they are where most of us start and end up, if income quintile is the measure. Age, not gender or class or education or race, correlates most strongly to income quintile. The bottom quintile is over-represented by kids fresh out of school and seniors whose retirement income is lower than their peak working income was.
http://www.urban.org/publications/406722.html
excerpt:
In 1990, of the families that comprised the lowest 20 percent in household income -- the bottom quintile -- 55 percent had no income earners at all. And even among the bottom-quintile family members who were employed, only 24 percent worked full-time. On the other hand, in the highest quintile of income (i.e., the top 20 percent), 83 percent of families had two or more income earners.
The takeaway? Income isn't distributed, it is earned. Participation is what gets you results. While there's significant inequality of income, that correlates strongly to inequality of work. There's significant inequality of wealth, and that correlates strongly to inequality of both savings and creation of wealth.
that second link should be http://www.americanexperiment.org/publications/1995/199512hj.php
doh
I work in the welfare business. Most ordinary people read the poverty statistics and think of millions of starving people working for minimum wage without health care. All this, of course, is Bush's fault.
In reality, poverty statistics are rather interesting when you break them down. Among married couples of any race, the number in poverty is about 4%. Among single women with children, the poverty rate is about 24% for white women and about 37% for black women. Poverty is concentrated in households with kids headed by single women.
For health care stats, most people don't realize that if a worker is without health coverage for even one week, that worker counts in the yearly stats for "those without insurance". Perfectly healthy young working adults who don't choose to buy health care are also included in these stats, but those are not the people complaining to the poverty advocates.
When you hear that "47 million people are without health care" remember that many of these folks don't have it because they don't need it or want to pay for it.
Something tells me this might help the GOP, but that's just a hunch.
CBO now projects a deficit of $260 billion for fiscal year 2006, about $111 billion less than it estimated in March for the President’s budget (which included supplemental appropriations that have since been enacted). Most of that reduction results from higher-than-anticipated revenues. At 2.0 percent of gross domestic product, the 2006 deficit would be smaller than the deficits recorded in the past three years—3.5 percent in 2003, 3.6 percent in 2004, and 2.6 percent in 2005. So far this fiscal year, the federal government has run a deficit of about $239 billion, CBO estimates, $64 billion less than in the first 10 months of last year. On August 17, CBO will issue a report that presents its new 10-year budget projections and more detail on the updated 2006 estimate.
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"It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race." - Chief Justice John Roberts
The government's latest reading on the job market and a survey of factory purchasing managers offered fresh evidence that the economy has shifted into SLOWER growth, not faster as you are suggesting.
The only good news is that, so far at least, the economy isn't tumbling into recession.
Clearwater Conservative
I bet you were one of those who complained during the faster growth a while back, that it was a 'jobless recovery.'
But, the progressives want it both ways. It's in their nature I guess. And if they DO get it both ways, they'll then find something else to complain about, like Wal-Mart.
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.
When they can't complain about those two things they complain about "real wage growth" or some other random metric. There is always some metric they can use to convince themselves how bad things are. Things must be bad... BushHitlerBurton is in charge.
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson
or perhaps it's a trap people lay for themselves, is thinking there is one "economy" and that we're all subject to its whims. If the economy is "bad" we're all worse off than if the economy is "good".
There are lots of economies: one per industry, one per State/region, one per section of a State (Upstate New York v. NYC, Chicago v. downstate Illinois, etc), and even ... are you ready for this? ... one per person.
A person, company, industry, or State who are smart, lucky, and/or willing to work hard can succeed in any larger economy, "good" or "bad".
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More brilliance such as that can be found at the Academy. And yes, I know how pretentious I sound.
No mention that the decline in the jobless figures may be from people who have given up looking, from moms going back to work after taking the summer off, or quotes from a moonbat that the numbers are all made up by the White House? What about housing going up, not being available, and the billions who are legally barred from seeing a doctor by President Bush and the Republican controlled Congress?
That all just proves that the MSM is a Republican sham.
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More brilliance such as that can be found at the Academy. And yes, I know how pretentious I sound.