"The private sector is doing fine."

[RandFan]

Yes, it's logically possible, it's just not true. The private sector of the economy is still suffering badly. Worse than the public sector, as those sector-specific unemployment numbers I posted before indicate.

I commented on those numbers. I understand Obama's statement from the context of the trend of unemployment, public vs private and whether there is a net increase or a net decrease.

source Private sector job creation returned in February of 2010, the 13th month of President Obama’s term. Since then, the economy has added 4.3 million private sector jobs, a 4 percent increase....

Public sector employment is now down 608,000 workers since January 2009, a 2.7 percent decline.

1. The trend for private sector is good, jobs are up.
2. The trend for public sector isn't good, job are down.

Please to tell me if either or both of those two propositions are false.

 

[Dymanic]

That might be relevant if your position is that wealthy individuals are the only part (or even the largest part) of the private sector.

Unless I'm mischaracterizing current Republican thinking, it is that the best approach to revitalizing our economy is to regard these wealthy individuals as the most significant part of the private sector, as these are purported to be the "job creators". Was that not the entire justification for the generous Bush tax breaks in the first place, as well as the justification for their continuation even in the face of obvious failure? Do you dispute that "trickle-down economics" remains at the core of Republican economic policy?

I've never claimed to know what the President actually thinks. Nor do I particularly care.

That's interesting. President Obama is a very articulate man, and has consistently made his position on this quite clear, so I don't understand your confusion, but taking what you just said at face value, I find myself wondering: Do you often find yourself involved in discussions on matters you neither know nor care much about? Also: do you feel that you have a better understanding of what Romney is thinking? Personally, I find that rather hard to nail down considering how often he flips and flops, but maybe that's just me.

What he said was wrong. I'm not of the opinion that it's a huge deal (politicians make gaffes, it's seemingly unavoidable), but it's strange to see people trying desperately to defend what Obama himself already disowned.

What he disowned is the strawman. It was never his to begin with, and his statement is only a "gaffe" if taken out of context. I've seen creationists perform the same trick with mined quotes by Darwin or Gould (examples on request). I would hope that you at least understand that the context was his attempt to get Congress to act on his jobs bill. Do you agree that it was indeed taken out of context?

 

[Ziggurat]

1. The trend for private sector is good, jobs are up.
2. The trend for public sector isn't good, job are down.

Please to tell me if either or both of those two propositions are false.

I disagree with the highlighted portion of both statements. You can argue that they aren't false since those parts are subjective evaluations, but I disagree with them.

For the private sector, I think that while a positive rate of job growth is better than zero or negative, it's not good enough, given both the magnitude of the decrease which happened at the start of the recession and the fact that positive job growth is required to merely stand still due to population growth.

In fact, if you look at the employment to population ratio, we've been basically flat since Feb '10. You can see yourself by going to the Bureau of Labor Statistics here and entering series ID LNS12300000. The site uses Java, and I can't remember how I got direct links to work in the past. Flat isn't enough to qualify as "good" for me.

As for public sector employment I think the public sector is too large right now, a decrease in public sector employment isn't a bad thing. The public sector is in many ways overhead for our economy. It's necessary overhead, but making it bigger just to make it bigger doesn't help. Making it smaller could.

 

[BenBurch]

Ah! White is Black. Evil is Good.

I get it, Zigg.

And we have always been at war with Eurasia.

 

[Dymanic]

That "statistic" is crap.

You know, I always find that that sort of thing always comes off so much stronger if you at least try to back it up with facts.

It involves severe mischaracterizations of a whole bunch of spending to attribute growth Obama is responsible for to Bush.

Does it? Let's look:

So if we define "presently" as: the year 2012...

But even lying with statistics, you can only claim that growth in spending, and not actual spending itself, is low, and that only because it attributes so much growth to Bush in 2009.

The only thing I hate worse than lying with statistics is lying without statistics -- you know, like Romney's been doing with his blathering about the Obama spending "inferno". If you look closely at my post, you'll see that I specifically referred to the annualized growth of federal spending. To suggest that I was either saying or implying that actual spending was at its lowest point in decades would be, you know, one of them there strawman thingies, so I guess I'm glad you weren't claiming that I was claiming that.

 

[Ziggurat]

Unless I'm mischaracterizing current Republican thinking

You're responding to my posts, not the posts of "current Republican thinking". So my thinking is the standard by which I will evaluate your responses to me.

it is that the best approach to revitalizing our economy is to regard these wealthy individuals as the most significant part of the private sector, as these are purported to be the "job creators". Was that not the entire justification for the generous Bush tax breaks in the first place, as well as the justification for their continuation even in the face of obvious failure?

Most of the Bush tax cuts don't go to the wealthy, they go to the middle class. Didn't you know that?

That's interesting. President Obama is a very articulate man

No he isn't.

and has consistently made his position on this quite clear, so I don't understand your confusion

I'm not confused. I'm just not a sucker: I know that what a politician says and what he thinks aren't necessarily the same. And I don't pretend to be able to mind read.

but taking what you just said at face value, I find myself wondering: Do you often find yourself involved in discussions on matters you neither know nor care much about?

I'm not discussing what Obama thinks. I'm discussing what he said, and what's actually happening in the economy. You are the one appealing to what you think he thinks.

Also: do you feel that you have a better understanding of what Romney is thinking?

Nope. The only people I claim to have a better understanding of what they're thinking are people I know well personally.

I've seen creationists perform the same trick with mined quotes by Darwin or Gould (examples on request). I would hope that you at least understand that the context was his attempt to get Congress to act on his jobs bill. Do you agree that it was indeed taken out of context?

No, I don't agree that it was taken out of context, and yes, I'm well aware that he was talking about a jobs bill. But the private sector needs more jobs a lot more than the public sector does. So his claim is wrong in context.

 

[Ziggurat]

You know, I always find that that sort of thing always comes off so much stronger if you at least try to back it up with facts.

Does it? Let's look:

Look at what? An unsourced graph?

Presumably this is some variation on Rex Nutting's claim. His analysis was garbage. For example, the TARP funds get attributed as Bush spending, even though those funds were always supposed to be recovered. And when some of those funds were recovered, they were counted as a budget cut attributed to Obama. The recovered funds which Obama respent (which were originally never supposed to be respent) were thus counted not as an increase in spending by Obama, but essentially as no spending at all.

So you've got this massive surge in 2009 attributed to Bush which was supposed to be one-time, and then Obama makes that spending effectively permanent, and he wants to claim that Obama isn't a big spender. It's just not credible.

Oh, and then Nutting decides to use 2013 OMB baseline projections which include cuts that Obama is working to prevent, and which aren't included in the president's own budget.

The start point for his analysis is wrong, the end point for his analysis is wrong, the number he derives is nonsense.

You can read up about some of these criticisms here.

 

[Ziggurat]

Ah! White is Black. Evil is Good.

I get it, Zigg.

And we have always been at war with Eurasia.

I present facts and an argument. You respond with... well, nothing, really. OK, that's not fair. You've got a literary reference. One that doesn't actually address my argument, but hey, it shows that you've read a book! And it's an important book!

But I think you might want to reconsider what that book was actually about, because it wasn't about the dangers of smaller government. Oops.

 

[Dymanic]

You're responding to my posts, not the posts of "current Republican thinking". So my thinking is the standard by which I will evaluate your responses to me.

As far as I can see, you're mostly just parroting GOP talking points, so until you clarify how your thinking represents a deviation from that, I don't see the distinction.

Most of the Bush tax cuts don't go to the wealthy, they go to the middle class. Didn't you know that?

Does your thinking deviate from current Republican thinking in that you see tax cuts for the wealthy as failed policy insofar as job creation is concerned, and that you are not opposed to allowing those tax cuts to expire?

I'm not confused. I'm just not a sucker: I know that what a politician says and what he thinks aren't necessarily the same. And I don't pretend to be able to mind read.

"I'm not a mind reader, but as some degree of that ability is vital to understanding language, here's me doing a bit of mind reading anyway". I suggest you Google the phrase "pragmatic competence".

I'm not discussing what Obama thinks. I'm discussing what he said.

I find you to be a truly insightful individual; perhaps even a genuine deep thinker.

The only people I claim to have a better understanding of what they're thinking are people I know well personally.

Do you find this to be a drawback when attempting to decide between political candidates?

No, I don't agree that it was taken out of context, and yes, I'm well aware that he was talking about a jobs bill.

Another Google assignment then: "Cognitive dissonance".

 

[BenBurch]

I present facts and an argument. You respond with... well, nothing, really. OK, that's not fair. You've got a literary reference. One that doesn't actually address my argument, but hey, it shows that you've read a book! And it's an important book!

But I think you might want to reconsider what that book was actually about, because it wasn't about the dangers of smaller government. Oops.

It was about the dangers of a huge repressive government such as your party attempts to create every time it is in power. And your party uses newspeak, it absolutely does, and tells everybody that government is getting smaller when that really means you doubled it.

And you are no more honest in your argumentation than your party.

The numbers bear me out; GOP governments increase the size of government.

 

[RandFan]

I disagree with the highlighted portion of both statements. You can argue that they aren't false since those parts are subjective evaluations, but I disagree with them.

Could one reasonably come to the subjective conclusions based on the propositions sans subjective value?

1. Private sector jobs are trending up. Jobs are up.
2. Public sector jobs are trending down, job are down.

For the private sector, I think that while a positive rate of job growth is better than zero or negative, it's not good enough, given both the magnitude of the decrease which happened at the start of the recession and the fact that positive job growth is required to merely stand still due to population growth.

In fact, if you look at the employment to population ratio, we've been basically flat since Feb '10. You can see yourself by going to the Bureau of Labor Statistics here and entering series ID LNS12300000. The site uses Java, and I can't remember how I got direct links to work in the past. Flat isn't enough to qualify as "good" for me.

As for public sector employment I think the public sector is too large right now, a decrease in public sector employment isn't a bad thing. The public sector is in many ways overhead for our economy. It's necessary overhead, but making it bigger just to make it bigger doesn't help. Making it smaller could.

All well and good but not at issue IMO. The objective facts could reasonably be argued to satisfy the subjective conclusions. Obama can reasonably disagree with you and so do I.

 

[Dymanic]

Look at what? An unsourced graph?

Presumably this is some variation on Rex Nutting's claim.

Did you miss the references to the sources of the data? Did you take Rex's advice to "Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget" and "Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook"?

So you've got this massive surge in 2009 attributed to Bush...
Oh, and then Nutting decides to use 2013 OMB baseline projections...

Tell ya what. As far as 2009 is concerned, we could go back and forth forever on who deserves to get stuck with that tab; the guy who made the mess, or the guy who cleaned it up. So let's split the difference there. As for 2013, well, that's not here yet.

But what about THIS year, 2012. If you think the CBO has it wrong at a 0.7% rise, can you defend your claim?

 

[Peephole]

By that page's own admission, federal worker employment has actually been increasing, and that's what Obama has direct control over. State worker employment has dropped because a lot of states dug themselves into financial holes through profligate and unsustainable spending

Nowhere on that page does it say that, because that isn't what happened. It's basically been flat with the exception of the census:

And the reduction in state employees occurred as a result of the recession, not some other reason:

What he laments is despite his expansion of federal government and federal employees, the states have to balance their budget and so they have had to lay some people off.

As shown above, there's been no expansion of federal employees. That is a Republican lie. Nor has there been any other kind of expansion, with the exception of the stimulus but that's gone already. The only thing that's bigger now on the federal level, is social expenditures (social security, medicaid,...) because of the depression.

 

[Peephole]

BTW, some more statistics: government workers have the lowest unemployment rate (just 4.2% in March) of any sector of the economy.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm

Why do you think this is in any way relevant? It doesn't change the fact that hundreds of thousands were fired, and that under normal conditions hundreds of thousands would have been hired:

 

[Peephole]

I think govt payroll is too big.

Fiction? No, but what wealth do they create?

As a share of the US population, it's the lowest in more than thirty years:

Uh, no. No, it wouldn't. Government spending is very high right now, government unemployment is very low.

Not on consumption, investment and employment:

 

[Ziggurat]

As far as I can see, you're mostly just parroting GOP talking points

Try responding to what I actually write, not what you imagine I might think. This is, in fact, a perfect example of how you can get yourself into trouble by making assumptions about what someone believes. You keep ascribing to me positions that I never expressed.

Does your thinking deviate from current Republican thinking in that you see tax cuts for the wealthy as failed policy insofar as job creation is concerned, and that you are not opposed to allowing those tax cuts to expire?

Whether or not tax cuts for the wealthy have produced the job growth we want isn't really the question we face. The question we face is what will happen if we raise those taxes again. And I'm not convinced that it will help.

To start with, income taxes are a necessary evil. I don't believe in using them as a means of wealth redistribution. That doesn't mean I don't believe in some progressivism in the tax structure. But I accept that on the basis of balancing effectiveness in raising needed revenues with the harm that taxes do. So the only reason to raise income taxes on anyone is to raise revenue.

But what happened when the Bush tax cuts were enacted? What happened to revenue? Well, between 2003 and 2007, income tax revenue went up from about $1.78 trillion to about $2.56 trillion, about a 44% increase. Now, obviously a lot of factors besides the tax rate enter into that increase. If the economy does better for reasons having nothing to do with tax rates, then we can expect tax revenues to increase because of that, and maybe revenues would have been much higher still without the tax cuts. Inflation also contributes a bit, and so does population growth, though that should only be a few percent each over that time span.

But you're interested specifically in tax cuts for the wealthiest. So what happened to their income tax revenues? Well, they went up. But how much? Well, the top 0.1% went up from $117 billion to $225 billion, a 92% increase. The top 1% went from $256 billion to $451 billion, a 76% increase. Income tax revenues went up across the board, but they went up more for the rich than for the poor. A lot more. Lowering taxes on the rich may not have done much to spur job growth, but on the flip side, it didn't lower revenues either, but if it had any affect on revenue, it seems to have increased it. Conversely, I don't expect raising those rates to do much to raise revenues either. And revenues are the only justification for and the only benefit provided by income taxes. Everything else they do is a harm. So no, I'm not in favor of raising taxes on the wealthiest at this point in time.

Oh, and this is the source of my numbers above.

Do you find this to be a drawback when attempting to decide between political candidates?

Nope. I'm sufficiently comfortable with my ability to predict what they will do. Whether they do the right or wrong thing out of honest conviction or cynical power calculations is quite secondary to me, I really care about whether they do the right or wrong thing.

 

[Ziggurat]

Tell ya what. As far as 2009 is concerned, we could go back and forth forever on who deserves to get stuck with that tab; the guy who made the mess, or the guy who cleaned it up. So let's split the difference there. As for 2013, well, that's not here yet.

But what about THIS year, 2012. If you think the CBO has it wrong at a 0.7% rise, can you defend your claim?

If government spending is already too high, then the right growth is negative. The fact that 2012 has a low but still positive growth number (which I never contested) is not impressive.

 

[Ziggurat]

It was about the dangers of a huge repressive government such as your party attempts to create every time it is in power.

And your party uses newspeak, it absolutely does

It's not "my party". I don't believe I have ever declared any party affiliation on this board, nor does my party registration constitute anything beyond a choice of which primary I want to vote in.

And as for "newspeak", umm... overseas contingency operations? Man-caused disaster? Kinetic military action? Spending reductions in the tax code? Even John Stewart calls that last one Orwellian.

Furthermore, you seem rather fixated on attacking something other than my actual argument. Nothing in your latest response addresses anything from the post you previously responded to. Again, I put forth facts and an argument. You continue to address neither.

And you are no more honest in your argumentation than your party.

Yet you cannot say why. You cannot contest the facts I provided, you cannot counter the argument I put forth. All you can do is level accusations against me, and hope that you can tar me by attacking someone else.

The numbers bear me out; GOP governments increase the size of government.

This is the ONLY statement in your response that constitutes anything even resembling an argument, rather than an attempted insult. Small problem: I never claimed otherwise. Congratulations, you've knocked down a straw man. Now man up and try addressing what I did write.

 

[DavidJames]

It's not "my party". I don't believe I have ever declared any party affiliation on this board...

You're fooling no one other then maybe yourself. You declare your party loyalty with every post, all 23,000 of them. indeed.

 

[RenaissanceBiker]

Fact: I just got my first raise in 3 years.