Actually, there is considerable reason to believe that things would have turned around about when they did, if not sooner, had not both Shrub and Obama tried to "stimulate" things. I do agree that there was a kind of euphoria that accompanied Obama into office, and that may have been responsible more than anything else for some improvement in 2009, but that's perception not reality. The reality is the flattening out in 2010 and later, which I do attribute to the backside of the "stimulus."

But you're not going to convince me, and I'm probably not going to convince you, so probably not much point in continuing. Oh, and I really don't need to read Wiki to understand what happens in recessions/depressions.

(03-29-2012 10:09 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  I was basically poking fun at those who on 1/20/09 suddenly required everything to be paid for when it was never an issue before that apparently.

A great example of what I hate about our currently bi-partisan politics: To Democrats, Reagan's deficit spending was going to doom us all* and Republicans thought it absolutely necessary. Now, we've reversed? Give me a f'n break. If my guy is in the WH, it's good strategy. Your guy? Utter disaster.

*If you think of RR as a trend-setter on this issue as opposed to a short-term strategist, this may be correct.

(03-29-2012 11:44 AM)Max Power Wrote:  And here's my source for saying we need 100,000 jobs/month to keep pace with population (actually according to Politifact the estimate range is 90k-150k, but still 162k is gaining jobs even under the highest estimate)
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/...ctor-jobs/

Quote:Dean Baker, a liberal economist, estimates that the economy needs a net increase of 90,000 to 100,000 jobs a month simply to keep pace with population growth, based on extrapolations from Congressional Budget Office and BLS data. Factoring in the ongoing drag from government job losses, the economy is barely meeting that number over the past year, and is well below that number since the official beginning of the recovery in June 2009.
Others put the monthly job gains needed to keep pace with population at 140,000 to 150,000.
Still, even achieving that benchmark would essentially mean treading water, and "doing fine" would require more net jobs than that to be created every month.

Hmmm, Baker is described as a "liberal" economist and the article even states that others put the number in the 140-150,000 range. Not sure how you get the 162,000 but it really doesn't matter. After losing jobs at the rate we did, a net gain of 12,000-22,000 per month isn't going to close the gap any time soon. And you're playing a bit of a semantic game by focusing on private sector jobs. Or at least Obama supporters in general are. They claim success initially because of all the public sector jobs they "createdorsaved" but now that the money has run out those jobs are going away, so they they ignore the declines there and isolate the private sector, where we are keeping up with population growth. A bit disingenuous, but it is the left, so to be expected.

For the record, I don't defend anything Shrub did. Basically he tried to "stimulate" just like Hoover did. And just like Hoover's "stimulus" efforts made the downturn last until FDR took office, Shrub's made it last until Obama took office. Then, in both cases, there was something of a euphoric feeling that probably boosted things for a few months, until reality set in and we stagnated. That's what's really different about this recession from other recent ones, it's not that the downslope going is was steeper (which would be "worst since the 1930s" stuff) but that it kept going down longer. There's only so long we can continue to shed jobs, I mean you can't fire everybody. One thing for sure, we weren't going to keep losing 800,000 jobs a month if nothing were done--that's not a sustainable path.