Why is this so hard to understand?

1) Retirees retire.
2) Some people lose hope and leave workforce because dickhead employers are holding onto huge profits, exec salaries just so Romney can win and give them tax breaks.
3) There are something like 300,000 unfilled jobs because people aren't qualified. You know why? Because in some cases, people who are qualified jump at entry or low-mid level jobs after being out of work for so long, leaving a skill vacuum at the top.
4) GOP obstructionism.

or

1) Obama is a Fart who mines farts while he secretly Muslim farts out socialism.

The only way we will ever really see low unemployment again is if we make huge changes to our way of thinking about work and consumption. Productivity increases in the past decades have basically meant that fewer people working are able to meet the needs of a larger population, and that trend will only continue to increase as automation gets better and more jobs are able to be accomplished by fewer people still.

What will happen when there is literally no reason to have a human being driving a truck, flying a plane, running a train, piloting a boat, etc.? What will happen when a huge warehouse can be managed by a tiny team of humans? What will happen when pharmacists, medical technicians and even doctors get replaced by automated systems? This stuff is happening now, and will be happening faster and faster sooner rather than later so we need to come up with plans now, need to adjust our expectations now, and need to get ready for the future now.

Change overtime laws to make anything over 20 hours a week overtime, and remove exempt positions. Make anything under 10 hours a week part-time and anything over count as full time. Double the minimum wage, move health care to single-payer, and mandate that the differential between the highest and lowest paid positions at a company (including temporary workers) may be no more than 25x, and that employees at every level get stock/profit sharing at a similar kind of rate. If the CEO gets 25000 shares, the lowest paid employee would get at least 1000, etc. The CEOs will still be doing just fine, and workers will get a fair shake too.

To benefit employers, offer substantial tax incentives to firms that are hiring and growing, and substantial tax penalties for firms that are laying off workers. Make the benefits and wages a firm offers employees part of the criteria for government and municipal contracts - the higher median wage, the better chance of getting large municipal contracts, all other things (like performance) being equal.

You'll have more people working less time to make the same amount of money (relatively), and will boost quality of life vastly for most people, allowing families to have more time together, parents more time to actually raise their kids, and all the benefits that provides.

On top of that, invest in infrastructure and hire and train people to do that. Cut the defense budget in half and take that money to spend on things like improving our communications networks (why the hell can't I get cheap fiber optic to my home in Chicago? Why isn't there the equivalent of a Manhattan project for repairing bridges, railways, etc. in this country?)

We have the money - we just spend it on destruction instead of creation. We have good people, smart people, people eager to work, so let's put them to work.

Or we could just give millionaires more tax cuts and spend all our money killing brown people, I guess.

When you can't even have the last President to represent your Party speak at your Convention because of his absolutely dismal economic record I don't want to hear from you about how Obama is screwing up the economy.

impaler: MyRandomName: Why didn't Carter speak at the dnc?

Because he did?

Link

Actually, if you go back and listen to Carters 1980 acceptance speech, it sounds very much like the one Obama gave last night. So, in a sense he did speak, aside from that tape BS...

On a side note, I found it laughable when Clinton (in the tape) wondered if he would have had the courage to pull the trigger on Bin Laden. Well, history tells us he wouldn't have because he did have two chances at him and passed. Thanks Billy Jeff for that reminder.

sprawl15: sprawl15: Halfway there!

Continued...

H.R. 8 - (no action) This bill extends the Bush Tax Cuts for another year. This specifically exempts itself from PAYGO. It also starts the restructuring of the tax code into two brackets (10% and less than 25%), reducing the corporate tax to less than 25%, repealing the AMT, and 'reforming' foreign taxation.
H.R. 6169 - (no action) This bill implements the above restructuring.
H.R. 1904 - (no action) This bill trades protected Federal land to Resolution Copper Mining, LLC in exchange for non-Federal land that will become protected (including imposition of eminent domain on local towns).
H.R. 4402 - (no action) This bill extends the definition of 'infrastructure project' to include mineral mines.
H.R. 3012 - (no action) This bill increases the amount of available high-skill immigrant visas and immigrant student visas.
H.R. 1230 - (no action) This bill directs the Secretary of the Interior to conduct three specific lease sales of oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico and one off the coast of Virginia.
H.R. 1229 - (no action) This bill directs the Secretary of the Interior to end the moratorium on drilling and severely limits the ability of these company's employees to sue for failure to act in accordance with the law or company policy.
H.R. 1231 - (no action) This bill ends the drilling moratorium.
H.R. 2021 - (no action) This bill exempts Outer Continental Shelf oil/gas companies from the Clean Air Act.
H.R. 1938 - (no action) This bill forces the Keystone XL pipeline to be approved.
H.R. 2842 - (no action) This bill lets the Secretary of the Interior contract hydroelectric facilities that produce 1.5 megawatts of power or less.
H.R. 2578 - (no action) This bill reduces the protected length of the Lower Merced River in California. It also throws more money at Hydroelectric power on the Diamond Fork System in Utah, sells tribal land to corporations, expands the Mission Walk in San Antonio by 137 acres, and about a dozen more misc ...

By the way, next time anyone throws this BS idea out there, there's plenty of places online that already did the work for you. Link them to this to save up some time.

WhyteRaven74: So how would Greece defaulting on its debt affect a company in America that produces goods in American primarily for American consumers? Show your work.

A default in Greece is going to leave a whole lot of both European and American investors holding the bag even more than they already are if they hold any of their sovereign debt. Those same investors, and others, are likely to be shafted even more by the follow-on effects from such a default that occur in Italy and Spain. If either of those countries find themselves unable to borrow, the Euro stands a good chance of collapsing. Even if that doesn't happen, imports are extremely likely to slow further throughout the Eurozone, hurting a lot of companies such as Caterpillar and Boeing, farmers here in Washington, and about a million others. American companies and farmers that buy from American producers that sell primarily to Americans.

Do you think the fallout from our mortgage crisis didn't affect the European economy? Are you really this dense or is it just an act?

Mrtraveler01: I'm still figuring out how any of this is "class warfare".

Class warfare is what we will have (eventually) in this country if two key rapepublican policy outcomes continue: 1) increasing the wealth gap, and 2) making sure everybody can buy as many guns as they want.

ignatius_crumbcake: Pincy: I'm sorry, did I say something earth-shattering?

You agreed with the general concept that 'greed is good.' Corporations, like any other entity, act in their own self-interest. They are not altruistic, nor should they be. However, when corporations spend decades reducing the workforce and driving down wages while gutting the ability of workers to bargain for a better deal, all they do is reduce the amount of money flowing around the middle class. That means fewer people buying TVs and cars and eating at restaurants. They are hurting themselves in the long run by trying to boost profits in the short run.

What benefits the overall economy more: 100 people making an extra $10k a year, or one person making an extra $1 million?

Ya, I agree. My point was that the fault does not necessarily lie with the private sector but rather with the system we have put in place that allows this to happen. I wasn't saying I approve of how things work currently, because I don't. I was saying that we need to reverse the trickle-down incentives that have been put in place over the past decades.

leviosaurus: thurstonxhowell: leviosaurus: Would you play Russian Roulette with a four barrel gun?

[cdn3.hark.com image 320x240]

GUNS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!

erm... a four chamber revolver. That's what I actually said. The filter must've messed it up. Yeah, that's the ticket.



Think of it this way - Silver is saying that if Romney rolls a 4 with one of these die, then he wins. If you've ever been a D&D nerd, you've thrown one of these a bunch of times and you know that is not a roll you want to bet the country on.

So do we blame the president or the fact that a Minority party in congress has Filibustered almost every attempt to pass legislation to create jobs.

Things are lookin' up

qorkfiend: Gyrfalcon: Now is as good a time as any to ask a question that bugs me about this metric: What the hell does it mean "given up looking for a job"??

What does that mean? What CAN it mean? Does it mean that people have accepted living homeless and broke is now their lot in life and that they no longer even seek employment? Does it mean they've just stopped collecting unemployment? That they've merely stopped using regular (i.e. government tracked) employment agencies? Or that when asked, they flippantly replied, "Nah, I've stopped even looking for work"? Or were previously the unemployed job-seekers being classed as "employed" as in "employed in seeking employment"?

It seems to me there are only two states of being: Either you are employed or you are not. And regardless of whether you are "looking" for a job or have "given up looking" and resigned yourself to eating scraps from the dumpster behind McDonalds, in both cases you are NOT EMPLOYED.

Is there some other, third state of being regarding jobs I'm unaware of? Or is this like how the budget was artificially lowered by not counting war costs, only in reverse: "We've decided that the unemployed job-seekers are now officially unemployed and no longer officially...unemployed"?

I guess there's the people who aren't legally eligible to work.

Yeah, but that doesn't really answer the question "who or what are the people no longer looking for work"? Who are these people, and what the f*ck do they do? What does it mean "380,000 people are no longer looking for work"? How is that even determined?

I mean, I'm "looking for work", but not every minute of every day; I have other things I do some days that preclude me from actually "looking for work" on those days. So am I "unemployed" or just "not looking for work" on those days? And if I stop for a week and then start back up again, does that change my status? If someone is collecting unemployment AND looking for work, where do they fall on this graph?

It just seems to me to be a weird thing to say and a weird group to somehow "add" to the numbers of unemployed, since it seems to imply that job-seekers are neither employed nor unemployed; and that's impossible unless they work for Schrodinger.

skullkrusher: what do you think has changed? Suddenly what happened in the past 4 or 5 years to make things different?

The people running things are different than they used to be. The people who ran things in the past thought of the larger economic consequences of their decisions and operated on the assumption that if it's good for the economy it's good for business, likewise what's good for business is only that which is good for the economy.

Republican plan:

1. Do everything humanly possible to keep the economy from recovering.
2. Wait for 2012.
3. Run a campaign based on the fact that the economy is not as recovered as we'd like.

I don't hate America enough to vote republican.

WhyteRaven74: BigJake: this is a joke, right

Nope. By having people fewer people do more work you're wearing out your employees faster also making growth in productivity harder to achieve. And then there's the fact there are fewer people with money to buy what you make. This used to be standard for every CEO, they understood that what might seem good on paper today could actually be bad tomorrow.

Yeah, but these days, you gotta hit your quarterly earnings targets so you get your bonuses. There's absolutely no incentive to think long-term.

jst3p: sprawl15: jst3p: Cheesecake, with its lack of a top crust, is technically a pie. And cheesecake is greater than cherry pie.

The best cheesecake doesn't need a crust. Just a crumble.

/seriously, the trick to cheesecake is to rice the cream cheese


upgrade the exaust, body kits, nitrous, spoilers, speakers, lights?

[www.civicforumz.com image 400x300]

Seriously, though. This is a potato ricer:



When ricing cheesecake I prefer to get one of those wire strainers and just smash it through with a spoon:

 

It makes the cheesecake amazingly light.

leviosaurus: Would you play Russian Roulette with a four barrel gun?



GUNS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! 

JokerMattly: leviosaurus: MisterLoki: [i568.photobucket.com image 380x446]

People keep posting that as if it means Obama is a lock for re-election. If that's what you think it means, then you don't understand what it says. Those aren't poll numbers, they're odds. It's saying Romney has a little worse than a 1 in 4 chance of winning the election. Sure, Obama is in a better position, but that is a long, long way from certain victory. Would you play Russian Roulette with a four barrel gun? If you're an Obama supporter and that sounds like lousy odds to you, then you shouldn't be happy with these numbers.

In politics, a 77% percent chance for victory might as well be a landslide.
Similarly, if you get a poll back and its 60/40, you do not get excited because you're only 20 points behind your opponent. you don't say "Well, he's only got 60%!"

Anyhow, it's an aggregate of electoral math. Common sense says that Romney's losing his footholds and his paths to 270 - that's one of the reasons why Obama is up nearly 10% in the last week.

If you get a poll telling you that your opponent is leading by 20 points, Nate Silver will give your opponent a 100% chance of winning the election. He isn't doing that here. If his model is off by as little as 3 states, you're looking at President Romney.

Nobody's a bigger fan of Nate Silver than me. If I had to pick anyone's numbers to trust, they'd be his. But even he says there is too much uncertainty to be too confident in these numbers right now. Some of his assumptions have not played out - like a post convention bump for Romney - and he isn't certain if that means Romney is behind or if post-convention bumps are a thing of the past with the advent of the Internet Age. If that's the case, then Obama's number will drop like a rock when the polls come out next week. This election is anything but typical. He could adjust his model tomorrow and show Obama as behind.

Now is as good a time as any to ask a question that bugs me about this metric: What the hell does it mean "given up looking for a job"??

What does that mean? What CAN it mean? Does it mean that people have accepted living homeless and broke is now their lot in life and that they no longer even seek employment? Does it mean they've just stopped collecting unemployment? That they've merely stopped using regular (i.e. government tracked) employment agencies? Or that when asked, they flippantly replied, "Nah, I've stopped even looking for work"? Or were previously the unemployed job-seekers being classed as "employed" as in "employed in seeking employment"?

It seems to me there are only two states of being: Either you are employed or you are not. And regardless of whether you are "looking" for a job or have "given up looking" and resigned yourself to eating scraps from the dumpster behind McDonalds, in both cases you are NOT EMPLOYED.

Is there some other, third state of being regarding jobs I'm unaware of? Or is this like how the budget was artificially lowered by not counting war costs, only in reverse: "We've decided that the unemployed job-seekers are now officially unemployed and no longer officially...unemployed"?

sprawl15: jst3p: Cheesecake, with its lack of a top crust, is technically a pie. And cheesecake is greater than cherry pie.

The best cheesecake doesn't need a crust. Just a crumble.

/seriously, the trick to cheesecake is to rice the cream cheese


upgrade the exaust, body kits, nitrous, spoilers, speakers, lights?

praymantis: CPennypacker: TIKIMAN87: AdolfOliverPanties: Obama's plans work. Steady job growth, even though the GOP has fought and blocked everything that would help.

The stock market is at record highs and corporations have never made more profits.

The stock market is high becuase his buddy Ben Bernanke has printed trillions of dollars into the system. The market is inflated and will crash even harder in the end.

Obama has all 3 branches in his first 2 years and yet he passed no jobs bills. Only cramming health care through.

FALSE

Hey I can do that too TRUE

_{except it really is false}

soy_bomb: 368,000 people dropped out the job market, 96,000 found jobs. That's a recovery?

Ever heard of retirement?

A vast majority of long term unemployed are simply unemployable.

MisterLoki: [i568.photobucket.com image 380x446]

People keep posting that as if it means Obama is a lock for re-election. If that's what you think it means, then you don't understand what it says. Those aren't poll numbers, they're odds. It's saying Romney has a little worse than a 1 in 4 chance of winning the election. Sure, Obama is in a better position, but that is a long, long way from certain victory. Would you play Russian Roulette with a four barrel gun? If you're an Obama supporter and that sounds like lousy odds to you, then you shouldn't be happy with these numbers.

368,000 people dropped out the job market, 96,000 found jobs. That's a recovery?

Agneska: Obamanomics don't work. But don't worry, he'll shower you with food stamps as you stand on the unemployment line.

I find this highly amusing, considering all of the contradictory pieces of evidence in this very thread.

TIKIMAN87: 386,000 people dropped from looking for employment last month.

96,000 jobs created and unemployment drops .2%. WTF

This is Obamas America everybody. Sucking off the government.

Throw his ass out!

You back from vacation already or did Drew make you take a blackberry?

Fun Fact: Romney's campaign wouldn't allow him to make a statement on the jobs report this morning until they could do it when there were no cameras present, for fear of him looking gleeful about the lower than expected numbers.