freeman2 wrote:Jobs report looks good...I could have sworn someone around here was predicting this jobs report would be a negative harbinger of all the end bad things to come in Obama's next 4 years with regard to the economy...

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/12/07 ... d%3D242437

“It’s not something to get too excited about,” said Nigel Gault, chief United States economist for IHS Global Insight. “The number is 146,000 and the average so far this year is 151,000. We’re pretty much in line with what we’ve been doing.”

Seventy-three percent of the new civilian jobs created in the United States over the last five months are in government, according to official data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In June, a total of 142,415,000 people were employed in the U.S, according to the BLS, including 19,938,000 who were employed by federal, state and local governments.

rickyp wrote:The problem with your mantra on tax/spend/borrow
is that the US Federal taxs are at the lowest in terms of GDP, in a very long time.

But you keep believing in a different reality

The federal government borrowed 46 cents of every dollar it has spent so far in fiscal year 2013, which began Oct. 1, according to the latest data the Congressional Budget Office released Friday.

The government notched a $172 billion deficit in November, and is already nearly $300 billion in the hole through the first two months of fiscal year 2013, underscoring just how deep the government’s budget problems are as lawmakers try to negotiate a year-end deal to avoid a budgetary “fiscal cliff.”

Higher spending on mandatory items such as Social Security, Medicare and interest on the debt led the way in boosting spending compared with the previous year, which also highlights the trouble spots Congress and President Obama are struggling to grapple with.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Americans' outlook on the economy and their finances took a turn for the worse in early December, likely due to anxiety about the potential for higher taxes resulting from contentious discussions in Washington over fiscal issues, a survey released on Friday showed.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan's preliminary reading of its index of consumer sentiment plunged to 74.5 in early December, the lowest level since August.

It was far below November's figure of 82.7 and the median forecast of 82.4 among economists polled by Reuters.

freeman2 wrote:Jobs report looks good...I could have sworn someone around here was predicting this jobs report would be a negative harbinger of all the end bad things to come in Obama's next 4 years with regard to the economy...

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/12/07 ... d%3D242437

danivon wrote:

freeman2 wrote:Jobs report looks good...I could have sworn someone around here was predicting this jobs report would be a negative harbinger of all the end bad things to come in Obama's next 4 years with regard to the economy...

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/12/07 ... d%3D242437

Indeed. Said the same thing about the previous 2 jobs reports. After each he went on to move the goalposts to suggest that not being amazingly good was the same as being awful.

and this time...

Unemployment didn't go down in November (from 7.9% to 7.7%) as the BLS reported, it actually went up. The true unemployment rate, calculated at the labor force participation rate that existed when Bush 43 left office (65.8%), increased from 10.7% to 10.8%. This put the true unemployment rate 1.3 percentage points higher than when Obama's so-called "economic recovery" began, almost 3.5 years ago.

As of November 2012, total employment was still 3.2 million below its peak, which occurred five years earlier. This is particularly ghastly, because America's working age population has increased by 11.2 million since then. Less than 1% of incremental working-age Americans have managed to get jobs since Obama took office.

But wait. There's more.

America moved another 246,000 jobs further away from full employment during November. We had fewer full-time jobs last month than we did in January 2005, which was almost eight years ago.

Assuming that November's CPI comes in as expected (2.0% annual inflation rate), the real wages of ordinary ("production and non-supervisory") workers were 1.9% lower in November 2012 than they were in November 2010. They were also 9.0% lower than they were in November 1964, for that matter.

freeman2 wrote:Jobs report looks good...I could have sworn someone around here was predicting this jobs report would be a negative harbinger of all the end bad things to come in Obama's next 4 years with regard to the economy...

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/12/07 ... d%3D242437

The fourth-quarter shrinkage in economic output comes as a shock to analysts on Wall Street, who had been expecting 1.1% growth according to a poll by news agency Reuters. Not one economist surveyed had predicted an economic contraction.

Economists said the surprise decrease in the nation's gross domestic product wasn't as bad as it looked. The weakness was primarily the result of one-time factors. Government spending cuts and slower inventory growth subtracted a total of 2.6 percentage points from growth.
Those volatile categories offset a 2.2 percent increase in consumer spending, up from only 1.6 percent in the previous quarter. And business spending on equipment and software rose after shrinking over the summer.

geojanes wrote:

Economists said the surprise decrease in the nation's gross domestic product wasn't as bad as it looked. The weakness was primarily the result of one-time factors. Government spending cuts and slower inventory growth subtracted a total of 2.6 percentage points from growth.
Those volatile categories offset a 2.2 percent increase in consumer spending, up from only 1.6 percent in the previous quarter. And business spending on equipment and software rose after shrinking over the summer.

The shrinkage is due entirely to cuts in Gov't spending and inventory. You think that cuts in Gov't spending is a good thing, right? So this is a good report for you. Or am I wrong?

Less spending from the Pentagon, for one. Government defense expenditures plunged by a staggering 22.2 percent between October and December. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Pentagon spent significantly less on just about everything except military pay. Had the Pentagon not cut back on spending, the economy would have grown at a weak but positive 1.27 percent pace....

Yet the ups and downs were especially sharp in 2012 — soaring 13 percent in the third quarter and dropping 22.2 percent in the fourth quarter. Part of that is due to the fact that defense spending is shrinking overall, thanks to budget pressures and the drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan.