Did you know the recession ended? Seriously…..the Obama apologists are trying to sell that manure but the majority of the nation knows better:
Economic experts may believe the recession is over, but try telling that to the public.
Seventy-four percent of Americans believe the economy is still in a recession, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll. Only 25 percent think the downturn is over.
One-third of Americans say the recession is serious, while another 29 percent characterize it as moderate.
The perception, based on their own individual economic conditions, is that there is no way in hell the recession is over and that perception means they will hold back on spending which, along with Obama’s anti-business attitude, keeps the economy nosediving.
On top of that housing looks like its falling flat once again:
The collapse of the housing sector was a major driver of the nation’s economic woes. Now, a new wave of weakness in housing poses risks to the fragile economic recovery.
Fresh data released this week offer a portrait of a residential sector that is muddling along at low levels, though nothing resembling the freefall of 2006 to 2009. On Thursday, the National Association of Realtors said that sales of previously owned homes rose 7.6 percent in August – a disappointing result, as analysts had hoped for a stronger bounce back after sales tumbled 27 percent in July.
But hey, bring a comedian into Congress….it will make everyone feel better:
See author page
OBAMA says the recession is over! This is not the first time
that OBAMA was wrong, wrong, wrong!
What is he smoking?
@ tess, are you silly in the head enough to believe that the Pretender could pass a drug screen that the Military does or pass on a Security Clearance investigation that Military Enlisted and Officers go through?
I think not.
Where is Emmett Kelley when his country needs him?
Don’t worry, he’ll be out blaming Rep. Boehner next week.
That’s his M.O. Nothings his fault.
I wonder if he sits on the edge of the bed every night and wonders how he ever got there…..
Before Obama came into office any recession was considered over when 3 consecutive quarters showed positive numbers in the GDP.
Yup, our GDP went up for three straight quarters by June of 2009, according to the facts.
BUT Obama could not continue to ”blame Bush” for the bad conditions in the economy and the country IF he declared that downturn over, so he ignored it (at the time).
Now, I have read that, technically, our lack of demand has caused imports to plunge which oddly has an effect on raising our total GDP.
Also our increase in exports helps that number.
But neither of these things makes life better for people here.
So, perhaps the 3 Q rise in GDP is not an accurate indicator for whether a recession has ended anymore.
However, I’m not blaming Bush for any of this.
Obama’s economic policies are what are stretching out this downturn.
It’s the uncertainty he keeps putting on the plates of business, the engine of the economy.
Paid on either Federal Grants or actually hired to address Congressional need of info, which means they’ve got a contracted job in this hard job market and don’t have to wait in line at the unemployment centers or have to trim back a good portion of personal budgets just to make ends meet. Good job Economists, good job for being bias when you’re not supposed to be.
As for GDP, while its percentage has indeed gone up, so has Governmental spending levels that have have made such GDP gains almost a moot point for the nation when a large swath of the GDP per year will be dragged down by a spending deficit that seems to see no end in sight that will soon surpass GDP. Our debt is what, I’m guessing here as I don’t have the time to dig due to time crunch, soon projected to encompass roughly 90 percent of our annual GDP while the Deficit levels could be reaching that level by 2016?
Consumers are antsy as to if the Congress, current and the new one come this election, will vote to increase taxes. Even a 300 dollar increase in taxes means a person won’t be spending that 300 on a luxury good or service which means companies will have to inflate prices or trim employees. A person facing a hike in taxes is not going to keep paying certain subscriptions such as internet service when said person is either already facing a decreased pay rate from their own work place or has been laid off and have a fixed budget, this I do think is why a large swath of the American population feels the recession isn’t over at all (given a lot of people have had to take a hunky pay cut just to stay employed in some fields.)
The recession will be over when new leadership walks up the White House steps. Even a clean-out of Congress won’t quite do the job.
All of Business big and small, is looking for leadership change. So is the consumer. The economy is very much affected by the general state of mind, and that thing we call “confidence.” On that percept, Obama rates worse than Jimmy I-Rewrite-History Carter.
Pols can pretend all they want – Reality says this recession is not over. Unfortunately we are also hearing some fatalistic claims that this is a new “normal” for America. It isn’t because the current leadership is not permanent.
I can’t help but recall a quote from that outstanding Democrat Statesman LB Johnson: “Did y’ever think, Ken, that making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.”
So it seems the country is regarding Obama’s knowledge and skills at managing the nation’s economy as just him pissing down his leg and marveling at how warm it is.
“I am Sir Oracle, And when I ope my lips let no dog bark” The Bard describing Obama in The Merchant of Venice 1:1
Of course to know the recession is over from the view in your Ivory Tower, Obama must have mastered Mathematics and logic as Einstein explains: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
Do you think Obama can wrap himself around that one. I friggin well doubt it!
* From George Orwell on a much more important matter than Obama’s lying to give Americans confidence in a recovery that doesn’t exist: “The Quickest Way to end a war is to lose it.” Second Thoughts On John Burnham.
And in other news, the sky is now purple, because the government has declared it to be so!
*runs outside, looks up, rubs eyes and wonders why the sky still looks blue*
We’ve just survived a near shut-down of the U.S. financial system that threatened us with the prospect of a total economic collapse. Anyone who expected an immediate return to pre-crash conditions should probably be drug tested. Anyone who claims their policies could have brought that about is lying.
Figure on a long, slow recovery. Don’t expect the return of irresponsible, debt-based consumer behavior. Those days are gone.
While I was a boy, I was told that anyone could become president: I didn’t believe it, now I am convinced.
GREG: hi, NO those days are not gone,DON’T be defeatist like DEM
YOU underestimate the POWER of the AMERICANS to recover after they can believe in a new leader to serve the PEOPLE for the PEOPLE by the PEOPLE, YOU will see the speed of RECOVERY
to be instantly showing, as you will see the hope for more secure days begin, from the
beginning of the new LEADER which will restore the pride of being AMERICAN IN this SUPERPOWER
able to correct it’s terrible ERROR done,by being influence by foreign influence, which is the wrong reason why, to have elected A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Something tells me that if republicans held house and senate majorities, we’d be in one HELL of a recession. Just a guess, of course.
@ Greg, Three Questions:
1) Ever run Your Own Business?
2) Ever have to meet a payroll out of Your Own Pocket?
3) Can You answer those questions honestly?
If not, then FA is not your soapbox, Skippy! 👿
US Census date is revealing a change, a shift in the House of Representatives.
Texas + 4 seats.
Florida + 2 seats.
Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington each + 1 seat.
New York -2 seats.
Ohio – 2 seats.
Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania each – 1 seat.
People have voted about taxes with their feet.
To do that, to pick up stakes and move, indicates the savings are enough to make it a difference to the individual.
The national news interviewed the multi-millionaire who founded the PayCheck company that many businesses use to create their paychecks.
He is packing up and leaving New York state.
Every dollar counts.
Does the current record number of bank closings qualify as an uptick in the economy?
It’s a fact. Barck Obama cannot be quarterback, he has no business or management experience what so ever. He was doomed to failure the day the nut-jobs “elected” the joker. But it won’t happen again. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
Poll shows Obama re-elect number at 38%
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/09/27/poll-shows-obama-re-elect-number-at-38/
“..Obama only gets 38% of likely voters to agree that he deserves re-election, while 44% say they will definitely vote against him — and another 13% say they’re considering doing the same…”
@ Old Trooper 2, #14:
The best management model for a business or corporation isn’t necessarily the best management model for a nation. In the case of a nation, there’s a far broader range of important and necessary considerations. Many of those fall completely outside the scope of profit-oriented business thinking. With many, arriving at the best decision can actually run against profit-oriented business logic.
@ Greg:
So if irresponsible, debt-based consumer spending brought about the crash of 2008, why/how is irresponsible, debt-based government spending gonna bring us out of the recession?
Regardless, you are very wrong in your assessment. Low interest rates, almost 0%, are the norm in this “recovered economy.” Radio commercials bombard us with “the lowest home loan interest rates in decades” commercials (it’s 2008 all over again!). Obama begs us to borrow at every opportunity. In fact, he leads by example, borrowing $1.4 trillion just this year alone. What are YOU smoking?
But you’re right on one thing: such action by the commies in charge of today’s government will lead to a very slow recovery. As in “never.”
Haley Barbour said it best: you can’t spend yourself rich.
Maybe you should remind the republicans. They’ve run up the total national debt to a far greater extent than democrats:
http://zfacts.com/ebooks/whose-national-debt.pdf
Reality check:
$12.5 trillion by 2019? The total is over $13.4 trillion already.
“Publicly held” slyly excludes over $4.5 trillion in “intragovernmental holdings”–loans against trust funds, revolving funds, special funds, etc. They’re IOUs that are in reality as much a part of the total debt as anything else.
When Obama took office that total debt already stood at $10.6 trillion. On the day George W. Bush was first inaugurated, it stood at $5.7 trillion.
Figure about $5 trillion added over 8 years of good economic times, which were already rolling along when President Bush took office.
The 2009 budget, btw, wasn’t Obama’s doing. It was an inauguration present, along with the 2008 economic train wreck that sent 2009 and 2010 federal revenues plunging through the floorboards.
TreasuryDirect is a good place to find interesting debt numbers. It lets you get very specific about dates:
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np
And a President, as much as people want to blame Obama and Bush, are only the signers of loans the Congresses have taken from International treasury agreements. This is a major reason why a large portion of Americans want the Incumbents of both parties voted out of power. Democrats during the Bush years in congress did hardly any objections to massive borrowing, just as the Republicans hardly objected to borrowing in Clinton’s second term since 1998 (hell most, like Barney Frank promoted the idea of Global Kens policy), why would they? They had to hide the screw-ups of Medicare and Social Security accounting fraud on their end from the People with an influx of borrowed money (the reason Bill was credited with a supposed surplus) after taking the funds out of these two programs and funding bloated pork. Just over the years their pet project spending have swollen faster than they can repay debts obtained. We still, STILL, owe the original 120 billion dollar loan to the Chinese gave to float Social Security during Bill second term of office during a Republican majority Congress.
Our deficit issues and the total sum debt has now started to pose a national threat to the United States as one of the major T-bill holders, People’s Republic of China, is known to use forced annexation policies to reclaim long standing debts to the Government even if it means global war. We have to, as per year on budget have to spend about 40 percent of our over all yearly budget on just loan repayments (mainly the interest rates owed). The genius of Congress is to borrow once again the money needed to pay off the Interest rates. This is the classic example of the neighbor who uses one credit card to the max, uses the second to pay off the first, the third to pay off interest rates, and the fourth to pay off the second. Eventually the rates will get too high, and the collectors will come, mostly by force if need be. China isn’t a credit card company, it’s the bloody Loan Shark in the seedy alleyway bar that will smash faces if it doesn’t get repaid.
Time for a Constitutional Amendment (which I have called for during Bush years) for a balanced budget. I was drummed out for calling out Saint Bush for deficits, and call for the same today.
Missile defense and all of this other pork? No way. Time to get out of Iraq, Afghanistan… pull our troops out of Japan and Europe. Provide for the common defense did not mean spending more than all of the countries in the world combined in defense.
Time to let them eat cake! We eat beef!
You won’t find me on the “constitutional amendment for a balanced budget” band wagon. That’s carte blanche for increased taxes, Blast. When Congress finds they’ve spent more than they take it, they now cite “the Constitution” as their power to raise taxes to cover their fiscal gluttony.
I’m with Levin and several others on this… the budget should be a reflection of GDP and revenue estimates. In other words, you don’t spend more than you anticipate pulling in based on the health of the economy.
@Greg:
Really?
Are you sure?
So, you see what really happened with Obie’s supposed “Immaculation present”?
The 2009 budget was written almost exclusively by Dims.
The 2009 budget contained more spending than GW Bush requested.
The 2009 budget was passed by both the Senate and the House…with a “Yea” vote from then Senator Obama…but was NOT signed into law by GW Bush.
The 2009 budget was then augmented with MORE spending signed into law by…wait for it…President OBAMA.
All of this happened while Obie, the Dim Congress, and an eager lap-dog media machine heaps the blame on Bush.
So, nice try on trying to push 2009 off on Bush, but, once again, your arguments are crushed under factual reality.
Mata
True that might mean increased taxes – especially since our representatives are spending the money… maybe then the taxpayers in general would pay more attention. Right now the government is a big ATM machine and the only way to fix it is to pay as you go – and the only rule that will work is a constitutional amendment. No congress (two year cycle) should be able to make spending decisions beyond their offices, unless they have paid for it (taxes or selling lands etc). The only exception would be a declared War.
The deficit is like a big tax deferment to the next generation who had no decision making authority in the expenditures. So why should they shoulder the bill? They shouldn’t, and it needs to be part of the Constitution to make sure that happens.
That has worked great huh? How many years in the past 30 have we actually not run a deficit? I count like 4 years… So that means that outside of those 4 years (in the past 30) we have only been adding to the national debt, which only generates interest to those who buy our debt and adds additional cost to the taxpayers, instead of paying off the debt and being debt free. Right now over 50% of the interest payments to our national debt goes outside of the country, to our friends in China for instance. I wonder how many Aircraft carrier buster bombs they can buy with the billions they get in interest payments we give them each year? Right now the interest rates are super low, but they will go back up again and we will be spending $200 to $400 Billion in interest per year alone, and that will go on forever and increasing forever unless we STOP it by disallowing present day representatives from “representing” the people of the future by deferring today’s expenses to the future generations to pay.
blast: hi, IT’S incredible to pay so much INTEREST, those numbers reflect the super spending amounts done on the back of AMERICANS; what a waste of money that could have profit right here to the people, and to think that is the PEOPLE’S MONEY being spend on their back,
this is not acceptable to continue any more,
GET the CONSERVATIVES ELECTED in a MAJORITY, there is NO OTHER WAY OUT, bye
AND WE don’t have any other choice, WE must do it.
ilovebeeswarzone,hi, I wish that it would be as simple as electing one party or another, both have been complicit and we need an amendment to reign in the spending by removing the authority to run deficits… maybe then the people will pay attention if they actually have to pay for what they get.
If ilovebeeswarzone meant FISCAL conservatives, they exist in all parties.
At my very first TEA party I brought a large Gadsen flag but no pole.
I thought I could hold it by hand but it was too big.
A Democrat, but a fiscally conservative Democrat, was there in the crowd.
He offered the poster post he had brought after the wind tore his really neat sign.
We took turns, so together we held that flag.
IF we could get fiscal conservatives in, R or D would be irrelevant.
blast:hi, yes that might work good, thank you, of course you know more than I do in there,
thank you,
NAN: hi, WHAT I had in mind realy, was our conservatives here, that realy could turn things around faster, because they know exactly what’s wrong, and what to do about it,
we just have to read them, in many comments, and they could take the keys of the HOUSE
and get in the cleaning ride away, without hesitation, because It’s their THINGS,
and their policies has not change except improve always with the respect of the CONSTITUTION
of this REPUBLIC SOVEREIGN. bye
Forty-seven Democrats have publicly demanded that Pelosi acquiesce to an across-the-board extension of existing tax rates on capital gains and dividends:
Note the phrase for everyone.
Apparently not even all the Democrats buy this meme that the recession is over!
@ NanG, #31:
What we’ve got there are 47 democrats out of 312, who recognize the effectiveness of an opposition propaganda pitch, and have put election year politics ahead of principle.
The Bush tax cuts were inequitable, heavily weighted in favor of those already having most of the nation’s wealth and income. Predictably this resulted in an acceleration of the ongoing redistribution of income upward, and an increase in the concentration of wealth at the top. It also added enormously to the national debt, since the tax cuts weren’t paid for with spending cuts. Instead, we launched two off-budget wars, cynically engaged in corporate socialism, and borrowed billions from China.
The people who pulled this scheme off plan to saddle the middle and working classes with the effects of the resultant debt, by defunding and eventually eliminating progressive social programs that are particularly vital to the working and middle class demographic. Social Security, for example–which has been a reliable cornerstone of mainstream America’s old age financial security for generations–will take the hit.
The argument is that mainstream America should be privately providing for its own long-term security, by investing what they can in the very system that tends to make the rich richer–in spite of the fact that such investments have been demonstrably unreliable for the small investor, in spite of the fact that they’ve been watching their shares of income and wealth steadily decline, and in spite of the fact that the upward redistribution of wealth and income have continued even during a recession that has hit them the hardest:
Albert Einstein famously defined insanity thusly:
Of course, doing the same thing again isn’t insane, if you’re one of the very wealthy. More of the same result is exactly what you’re after.