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Jan 4, 2008, 22:16 GMT
Bush expresses concern on US economy
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Older Talkback
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Who are the very first ones being laid-off? Illegal aliens. Will they return to Mexico and points south? No. Why? Most of them will not be able to and there will be no source of income for them at home if they returned.
I'm glad that I am not standing around Anold's shoes right now. He just thinks he has a budget crisis. In a few weeks, he will be seeing the MOTHER of All Budge Busters.
I don't fully agree with that assessment.
A number of illegals are involved with housing construction, and as homebuilding slows, they'd be let off to cluster around Home Depot with the rest of the crowd.
Businesses with 'legal' employees have to pay benefits and FICA, and have other costs in complying with regulations. Hiring 'illegals', however, gets the employer around much of that. The risk is an INS raid and penalties, but that tends more to impact outfits that hire illegals in 'bunches'. It costs taxpayer dollars to raid a business.
As to Bush, he has two ways of dealing with these types of problems. One is the 'foreign photo-op', and it appears per news reports that a deal has already been cut with the Israeli government to announce backing off of building 'illegal' settlements, which of course Bush has already complained about, 7 years after the fact. That will get some coverage until mid-January, or perhaps a bit longer.
The other is the 'wait for it' - one example was his touting of the Iraq Study Group's 2006 work for months before the findings, only to pay no attention once the findings came out. He pulls this swindle all the time; and now we're supposed to wait for his 'cure' in the State of the Union speech, like waiting for the medicine wagon in the Old West, when the guy with the magic potions cured 'whetever ailed you'.
He has very few levers to press - a tax cut in the face of mounting expenses is insulting to anyone with a brain, but always plays well with the GOP-leaning rockheads. The Fed can cut rates (and should), but that's not Bush's decision.
Illegal immigration is a large problem with the GOP voters, who saw no real action in securing our borders over the past 7 years (Lou Dobbs got THIS one right). McCain will take some punishment for his views on this topic from those same voters, who really have no 'true Conservative' to vote for, now that Thompson has admitted he does not even care about the Presidency, but still got 13 percent in Iowa for some odd reason.
(Now that Iowa is over, there's room to scare everyone about the economy. The Sunday talk shows will chew on this once Iowa has been digested, and the White House would rather they'd be talking about Bush's trip to the Mideast. I think everyone is pretty bored with Iowa right now, so let's see what the Sunday topics are.)
www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sat_econ_0105jan05,1,2012116.story? ctrack=1&cset=true
The nation's unemployment rate unexpectedly surged to 5 percent in December, making its steepest one-month increase since the economic tailspin of late 2001 and heightening concerns that the U.S. economy could be tottering toward outright recession.
While the government jobs report doesn't mean a recession is inevitable, it definitely represents 'a major warning shot that the economy is in trouble,' said Joel Naroff, head of Naroff Economic Advisers.
For Economic Outlook Group economist Bernard Baumohl, December's 'bleak' and 'awful' jobs report indicates that 'this business cycle is just about over,' and 'the only real question now is whether the economy will contract for one quarter or two.' Baumohl expects unemployment to peak at 5.7 percent during this summer.
A rising jobless rate can become a potent political issue, and with the nation entering a presidential election year, President Bush went out of his way Friday to say that 'this economy of ours is on a solid foundation.' He added that 'we can't take economic growth for granted,' however, and urged Congress not to raise taxes.
With higher energy costs creating inflation, since many goods are made of petroleum byproducts, in addition to direct costs tied to gasoline and heating oil, 'stagflation' is back in the news stories.
The Fed has to be careful, as too-deep rate cuts are inflationary. Americans are already paying more for imports because of the weak dollar, and increased exports are not enough to boost economic activity.
The GOP incumbents are properly nervous, because Bush is not running again (we FINALLY caught a break!), and keeping the GOP numbers up is not his problem. His mission seems to be his legacy, and now he has to also untangle the mini-mess created from the pocket veto of his own funding bill.
Enter 'stagflation' in the GOOGLE NEWS search box, and there are quite a few stories showing up, and discussion forums. Here's one:
www.smartmoney.com/decode/index.cfm?story=20080103
Coined in what was arguably the worst decade for the U.S. economy since the Great Depression, stagflation is a combination of declining economic growth (stagnation) and persistently rising prices (inflation). It's an especially pernicious enemy for monetary policymakers because their usual weapons for fighting economic threats — either raising or lowering interest rates — are somewhat neutralized. In general, cutting rates encourages economic growth by lowering borrowing costs, but it can also stoke inflation by giving consumers and businesses more money to spend. Raising interest rates tamps down inflation by discouraging borrowing and spending but can also slow economic production.
Today, prices are undoubtedly rising and the economy is slowing down after several years of expansion. On Wednesday, oil futures briefly touched $100 a barrel for the first time and closed at their highest level in nominal terms at $99.62. Consumer prices in November increased 0.8%, the largest monthly gain since September 2005, and were up 4.3% year-over-year, boosted by high food and energy costs. Meanwhile, in a sign that industrial production could be faltering, the Institute of Supply Management reported this week that its key index of manufacturing activity fell to its lowest level in nearly five years in December.
...we've spent 30 years destroying manufacturing of...well...everything in the USA. We've greenlighted free trade bills without restrictions, made permit processes and legal issues so hard to overcome our industrial base is decimated.
We no longer are players in Steel, lumber, chemical, paper, aluminum, tertiary metals, and just about everything else. Our auto business is just fine, if the home office is in Japan or Germany.
We outsource...everything. thrity years of liberals stifling growth in America, and we STILL kick ass! We compete with nations who have governments enable industry with tax breaks, trade sanctions, and every perk they can throw at them.
So, now, after Bush succeeds in record growth, record tax receipts, record employment, record low inflation, and record houseold wealth, the broken machine starts to go bad.
If I were Mr. Bush...I'd do nothing! I'd tell everyone what needs to be done and go back to my office and leave it for the next guy. Unfortunately for him, he's gracious to a fault.
(There's no turning off such asininity in a public forum, so it rests on the intelligence of the readership's 'schmuck detector' to follow your partisan nonsense. If you could get your head out of Bush's ass for 5 minutes and look around, the world might come as a shock).
This is no party's 'fault' - work moves to the lower-cost areas. First it was Mexico, and now it's China, and other nations in the Far East and even Eastern Europe. We could not reduce costs enough to compete with their advantages, and cost of living. They are graduating engineers in far higher numbers than U.S. colleges. To compound it, the top 10 Ivy League colleges are getting huge endowments from their graduates, and the rest of the U.S. college system gets meager pickings. The State universities, which graduate far more people, are bleeding.
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22043995/
'While the Ivies, which account for less than 1% of the total, lift their spending into the stratosphere, many public colleges and universities are struggling to cope with rising enrollments in an era when most states are devoting a dwindling share of their budgets to higher ed. 'Policymakers seem to have concluded that flat funding is all that public higher education can expect from the state,' says Ronald G. Ehrenberg, an economist who directs Cornell University's Higher Education Research Institute.'
While Bush pushed 'no child left behind' (which seems somehow to have bypassed you), we should be looking for those hard-workers and geniuses with new ideas (again, you missed the boat) and making sure that they were able to get the education that creates business leaders, and thought leaders. Those are the people who HIRE those 'left behind'. Bush underfunded his own mandate, stealing class time away from original projects and towards rote learning. I hope they're learning to pronounce 'nuclear'.
Bush has decreased educational spending, and dumped the money in Iraq, where probably 25% of it goes into the back hole of fraud and corruption. Contractors overbill even for the basic services, and a few companies prosper, at the expense of everyone else. If those costs were added to the esimated $1.5 trillion cost, in terms of taxpayer dollars, you'd see that 20% of the National Debt went into the dumper.
(2006)
www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=86486
President Bush proposed shrinking federal spending on education by more $3 billion in his new budget proposal released Feb. 6, but he also wants to launch new initiatives to strengthen math and science achievement and reform America's high schools.
The largest source of federal education aid to states, the $12.7 billion Title I program for low-income students, would receive no new funding under the president's proposed budget for fiscal year 2007, which begins Oct. 1. Title I accounts for about half of federal spending to implement the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which aims to close achievement gaps and get all students to read and do math at grade level by 2014.
(Feb 2006)
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5192631
The president's 2007 budget calls for $3.5 billion in Department of Education cuts. That's nearly a 4 percent decrease in funding compared to last year. Forty-two education programs are targeted for elimination. The biggest include arts education, vocational education, parent resource centers, the drug-free schools program and education technology grants. (Discretionary spending on education would drop from $57.5 billion to $54.4 billion -- a drop of $3.1 billion, or 5.5 percent, from a year ago).
In a briefing with reporters Monday, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings began by saying that education has gotten the largest percentage increases of any domestic, non-security agency since 2001, when President Bush took office.
That's true. Federal funding for education has gone up about 40 percent since 2001. But in the last two budgets (including 2007), education funding has been flat or it has been reduced. This comes at a time when the No Child Left Behind Act is forcing states to spend a lot more money on testing, teacher training and school improvement to meet the law's mandates.
(Since the GOP has done nothing but spend for the past 7 years, and Iraq is costing us heavily, the budget requires that spending be offset by cuts elsewhere. The Democrats managed to get some education spending put in, but it's a zero-sum game, and Bush has not provided enough funding for the 'No Child Left Behind' added requirements. Bush has saddled himself with Iraq and other military costs, bleeding domestic spending.)
www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/news-by-subject/budget-news/?i=51244; _hbguid=3826ba61-b5b2-4552-9185-5061a8d8d6ab
The budget contains $59.4 billion in funding for the U.S. Department of Education (ED), though an across-the-board recision of 1.75 percent (applied equally to all domestic programs) will leave actual spending at $58.4 billion. That’s still $1 billion more than in 2007—and $2.2 billion more than Bush had requested.
Under the new budget deal, federal funding for educational technology remains the same, at $272 million—though the recision will bring actual spending levels down to $267 million, thus marking the fifth time in the last six years that federal ed-tech funding has been reduced.
(This reveals the partisan gamesmanship that Bush uses to keep the war funding going, at the expense of domestic programs, while massive GOP spending from 2001-2006 drove up the National Debt. Now that the Democrats have the majority, Bush has suddenly turned cheapskate. Whatever else Bush is, he's the biggest phony ever to occupy the Oval Office - during his tenure, the entire U.S. got screwed. This is one reason that Huckabee and Obama are popular - the voters see 'honesty' as 'change', and the GOP incumbents are in real trouble in 2008, especially if a recession is recognized officially.)
www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/related-top-news/?i=50375;_hbguid=43e 5fa8d-a8b5-4e0c-81e8-c961c00b699a
President rejects 5 percent increase in education funding, while approving 9 percent increase in defense spending
Escalating his budget battle with a Democratic Congress, President Bush on Nov. 13 vetoed a spending measure for labor, health, and education programs that would have provided $63.6 billion for the U.S. Department of Education, a 5 percent increase over 2007 spending and 8 percent more than Bush had sought.
Included in the budget bill was $271 million in funding for educational technology, as well as $1.2 billion for career and technical education. Bush had proposed $600 million for the latter program and sought to kill the former entirely.
The president’s veto sets up what could be a nasty showdown over 2008 education spending, with the 2008 fiscal year already two weeks old. In exercising just the sixth veto of his presidency—all have come since Democrats took control of Congress earlier this year—Bush chided the opposition party.
“The majority was elected on a pledge of fiscal responsibility, but so far it’s acting like a teenager with a new credit card,” he told an audience of business and community leaders. “This year alone, the leadership in Congress has proposed to spend $22 billion more than my budget provides. Now, some of them claim that’s not really much of a difference. The scary part is, they seem to mean it.”
Bush vetoed the $150.7 billion labor, health, and education spending measure on the same day he signed a 9 percent increase in the Pentagon’s non-war budget, to $471 billion—although the White House complained that the Pentagon budget, too, contained “some unnecessary spending.”
www.taxjustice-usa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=119
A final consideration is this-with the text of the Free Trade Agreement as it now stands, Panamanian investors would get new rights in the United States, with no new disclosure responsibilities at home. We have a situation where it is very, very easy to set up a business subsidiary in Panama. Panama's 'corporate' specialists advertise the country has having the most favorable and flexible incorporation laws in the world, in addition to some of the strictest banking secrecy laws available.
So the FTA will just encourage more U.S. businesses to pursue a strategy for tax purposes, designed solely to evade taxes in the United States.
But then the text of the Panama agreement allows corporations and investors with a 'substantial business presence' in Panama-that is, registered subsidiaries of multinational corporations-to use provisions found in Chapter 10 of the agreement to bring a claim against U.S. laws using an international investor tribunal. Panamanian-registered corporations would be able to bypass the U.S. courts system altogether in the case of an investment dispute involving the United States.
That's right, Panamanian corporations-as well as Panamanian subsidiaries of U.S. corporations-would be able to bypass the U.S. legal system, and take their claims to an international investor tribunal. Historically, these tribunals have proven much more sympathetic to corporate interests than they have to public-interest regulation.
Shame on the American people for putting up with these frauds in the White House. How many times do you have to be a sucker until you catch on? The support for Obama and Huckabee are an expression of 'buyer's remorse'; but with a compliant GOP in Congress, nothing ever changes.
Throw the bums out.
...why should I spend tax money to put kids through college? Waht a bullsh-t concept!
Fed Ed - what good has it done in America? 1962 was the highest learning achievement in American history. After 40 years of fed ed, what do we have to show for it? Nothing! Wasted! All of it! Has Bush spent less? You BET he has! He should get out a wooden stake and mallet then hammer it through the heart! Fed ed is dead!
Bush got us the No Child Left Behind act and the liberal establishment spent the next 6 years derailing it.
What does any of THAT have to do with a cooling economy? Absolutely nothing!
Stupid? Boy, I'll say!
The poster child for 'left behind' has spoken, and we can all see what happens when someone has been deprived.
This country needs originality and ideas, and those come from a relative few (you're excluded). Those people should not be deprived of educational opportunities, because the U.S. profits many times over from whatever investment is made in their education.
Adult education for job retraining, for those skilled workers who've paid taxes for years, and have seen their jobs vanish, is likewise worthwhile.
I'd give you some reference material, but it's like talking to a wall - so why bother?
RE: Bush got us the No Child Left Behind act and the liberal establishment spent the next 6 years derailing it.
==========================
What trash bin do you get your ideas from? Bush put a mandate on local school systems, and then did not fund it. It became yet another local tax, since schools had to follow through regardless.
It was dead from the start, because the premise of everyone achieving mediocrity gets you nowhere. REPUBLICANS are against it, because they're afraid the kids would turn out like SP4 brainwashed robots, instead of people with original ideas, encouraged to advance where their own skills take them.
The funniest part is listening to Bush mangle the language, college degrees and all.
www.blueoregon.com/2007/03/education_is_no.html
Efforts to reauthorize the Bush regime’s signature No Child Let Behind Act are facing a formidable backlash. At least 50 Republican members of Congress have signed onto a bill sponsored by Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Michigan, that allows states to opt out of the act’s testing mandates.
The backlash against the No Child Left Behind Act should surprise no one. Like so many policies of the Bush regime, it is based on a foundation of false assumptions. No Child Left Behind takes the worst of the industrial education model and imposes it on every school district in the country by congressional fiat.
No Child Left Behind treats students like interchangeable widgets sitting in their assembly line seats getting their daily dollop of knowledge from an authority figure who stands in front of the class -- the sage on the stage. Then tests are administered to insure the prescribed knowledge has been absorbed. In some cases the curriculum is provided by a private contractor, and the classroom teacher is not permitted to deviate from the “script” to assure uniformity of results.
No Child Left Behind assumes all children learn the same information at the same rate in the same way at the same time. It assumes the accumulation of this information can be measured by tests. Any student who cannot pass the test is labeled deficient. It’s the school’s fault. The law assumes equality of outcomes. Every student will “succeed.” And this rhetoric comes from self-proclaimed conservatives who usually criticize programs like affirmative action for demanding equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity.
Children are not widgets. They are individuals who learn with different styles and methods at different rates and they require individual attention at times.
(2004)
www.cod.edu/people/faculty/mcgrath/CHILD.HTM
This colossal mistake began as a campaign strategy for garnering votes, whereby George Bush imagined he could fulfill his pledge to be the 'education president' by embracing the education reform movement's latest mantra of testing, testing and more standardized testing. The result is that, sadly, the history of come-and-go fads like new math or forced busing is being repeated, insofar as the weight of federal law has been applied to yet another fanciful trend concocted by educational theorists who, like the education president, have likely never taught a single minute in an elementary or secondary classroom.
Long before the president's act took effect, and when the administrators at our own schools were infected with the Excessive Testing Virus, meetings and debates and reams of agenda were imposed on wary faculties, experienced enough to realize that objective tests administered after a quarter or a semester or even a year, have limited reliability. No teachers we know would even think of factoring a standardized test score into a pupil's report card. Such scores may be helpful in supplemental ways, but they can never reflect a student's performance and achievment for a given time period. For education occurs according to a complex integrated, and cumulative dynamic that does not allow for 16- or 40-week segments to be validly and separately measured by the Iowa Basic, the S.T.A.R., the I.S.A.T., or any of the other machine-scored products-for-profit proliferating throughout the country.
(No kidding)
In Google, enter SP4 BOARD POSTER IDIOT and read the results.
www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&safe=off&q=sp4+board+poster+idiot
...doesn't make me wrong though...
My advice: find something in print...yes...an actual book...and try reading those for a while....
The last book you read only had 10 pages and lots of pictures. Mickey and Minney are as much up to date with reality as you are!
Bush is waiting until the State of the Union to announce his 'stimulus', which is no doubt another tax cut for the wealthy; rather than for those who would spend it.
Meanwhile, the market rose today, NOT because of Bush, but because they expect a steep rate cut from the Fed at just about the same time as Bush's speech.
The economic improvements in Bush's miserable tenure came from Greenspan's sharp rate cuts, and the accompanying refinancing of mortgages, which put a couple of TRILLION into people's pockets. That's MANY TIMES the amount of 'tax cuts' that actually made their way to the lower 95 percent of wage earners.
The tax cuts accelerated the growth in the National Debt, since Bush was too dumb to realize the costs of the Iraq war. The Laffer Curve is called a 'curve' for a good reason - at the other end of the curve, tax reductions create DEFICITS, as once taxes are low enough, the economy does not grow quickly enough to make up the greater difference from lost revenues.
(Here's our resident nitwit)
'So, now, after Bush succeeds in record growth, record tax receipts, record employment, record low inflation, and record houseold wealth, the broken machine starts to go bad.'
(Now Bush, our national nitwit)
www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/business/07cnd-Bush.html?_r=1&ref=business&o ref=slogin
CHICAGO — Dampening the administration’s customary upbeat tone on the economy, President Bush acknowledged Monday that the economic signs were “increasingly mixed,” but he also suggested he would oppose Democratic initiatives to increase spending to head off a recession.
In New Hampshire and elsewhere, the Democratic presidential candidates have also increasingly begun warning of a possible economic downturn and the need for actions in Washington, though they too have not been specific.
Mr. Bush’s comments insured that the economy would become an even more central issue in the campaign and Washington as Democrats and Republicans scramble to figure out how to address rising oil prices, the home mortgage crisis, a weakening job market and recession fears.
Mr. Bush, in his speech, told business leaders that while the fundamentals of the economy remain strong, “recent economic indicators are increasingly mixed” and the nation faces economic uncertainty.
“We cannot take growth for granted,” he said. “We confront economic challenges from the downturn of the housing sector, the high energy prices to painful adjustment in some of the financial markets.”
Though Mr. Bush did not warn of a recession — as some economists have — his speech, coupled with a separate address in New York by the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., was a marked shift from their most recent optimistic assessments.
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