Sunday, March 13, 2016

The thing to remember is that it's been on purpose

There's a good chance some lefty has cluttered your Facebook newsfeed with some meme along the "thank-you-Mr.-President" lines, touting a bullet-point list of stats designed to make it look like the Most Equal Comrade is an economic savior. The truth is far less rosy:

By almost every economic measure, America is flat to falling.
Obama certainly can boast about the unemployment rate. From his Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration until last month that figure has fallen from 7.8 percent to 4.9 — down 37.2 percent. But:
  • The labor force participation rate over that period has slid from 65.7 percent to 62.9 (the lowest reading since March 1978) — down 4.3 percent.
  •  On Obama’s watch, the percentage of Americans below the poverty line has grown, according to the most recent Census data, from 14.3 percent to 14.8 percent in 2014 — up 3.5 percent.
  •  Real median household income across that interval sank from $54,925 to $53,657 — down 2.3 percent.
  •  Food Stamp participants soared in that time frame from 32,889,000 to 45,874,000 — up 39.5 percent.
  •  Meanwhile, from Obama’s arrival through the fourth quarter of 2015, the percentage of Americans who own homes sagged from 67.3 percent to 63.8 — down 5.2 percent.
Gallup CEO Jim Clifton laments this chilling trend: “For the first time in 35 years, American business deaths now outnumber business births.” As he observed in January, “Business startups outpaced business failures by about 100,000 per year until 2008. But in the past six years, that number suddenly reversed, and the net number of US startups versus closures is minus 70,000.”
Clifton worries gravely that “entrepreneurship is now in decline for the first time since the US government started measuring it . . . Small and medium-sized businesses are dying faster than they’re being born. So is free enterprise. And when free enterprise dies, America dies with it.”
Something else is missing these days: robust economic growth.
“Over the 6 ½ years since the recession ended in the second quarter of 2009, real GDP has grown by a total of 14.5 percent, or at an annual rate of 2.1 percent,” according to Jeffrey Schlagenhauf, a former senior adviser to the congressional Joint Economic Committee.
“Other post-1960 recoveries averaged total growth of 28.4 percent (annual rate of 3.9 percent) over the comparable 26 quarters. The Reagan recovery of the 1980s saw real GDP grow a total of 35 percent, or at an annual rate of 4.7 percent.”

Consider this: the MEC is no genius, but he is fairly intelligent. He knows that his policies don't lead to widespread and robust prosperity. He's lived through times of widespread and robust prosperity, and because of the hard-left ideology that is in his bones,  he thought it was unfair to those who by statistical inevitability were on the lower end of the bell curve, even though the individuals comprising that group were different at any given time.

So he studied how to implement the Great Leveling Project, whereby the cattle-masses would all have equal, mediocre circumstances.


And, as we see, he's been a great success.

Of course, Squirrel-Hair chalks it up to incompetence, which shows that he doesn't get it. How could he see it? He has no grounding in how to discern anyone's ideological orientation. he doesn't see the world that way.

In all fairness, Mitt Romney didn't get it either. ("He's not a bad guy; he's just in over his head.")

The lesson here for the GOP is to quit nominating people for president who don't get it. Alas, the party may be too comatose to get that.


16 comments:

  1. Intentional, huh? Keep crying that mantra, because the truth is becoming more evident by the day and you will consequently look more and more like a driveling idiot.

    Robots taking jobs from manufacturing workers is a trend dating back decades, but rapidly advancing software has spread the threat of job-killing automation to nearly every occupation.

    The technological advances, while helping businesses boost productivity dramatically, have cost the U.S. economy millions of jobs.

    An investigation by the Associated Press found that most of the millions of jobs lost to the Great Recession did not migrate overseas, but simply disappeared – victims of smart robots and improvements to software that have made many jobs obsolete.

    "The jobs that are going away aren't coming back," Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of "Race Against the Machine," told the Associated Press. "I have never seen a period where computers demonstrated as many skills and abilities as they have over the past seven years."



    http://moneymorning.com/2013/02/04/robots-taking-jobs-from-every-sector-of-the-economy/

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  2. You do not make any kind of concrete connection between the stats Murdock cites and the automation trend. Therefore you are the one who comes off looking like the driveline idiot.

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  3. There is no entrepreneurial zeal to speak of left in post-America, and if robots had been the main cause, Murdock would have mentioned it. It's due to the regulatory strangulation imposed by this regime's instruments of tyranny, such as the EPA, the IRS, the EEOC, and the Departments of Labor, Agriculture and Energy, just to get a list started.

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  4. The proliferation of robots makes a goof smokescreen if you love socialism

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  5. It encourages everyone to throw up their hands in total passivity and say, "Well, there's no point in thinking of any profitable activity to engage in."

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  6. Smokescreen? I don't think so. You are a bunch of ghost dancers with no real political solution because there is none. It is not intentional and all your side (since you can't comprehend another word I use for your peeps, "ilk") can do is make crap up like the current state of economic affairs is intentional.

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  7. Open the link to the article and you'll find plenty of stats. Should I substitute the word Obama for robotics, is that it? It is Obama and not robotics, right, brainy boy?

    Increasingly sophisticated scheduling software has eliminated the need for many office assistants and secretaries; Labor Department statistics show a loss of 1.1 million such jobs in the decade between 2000 and 2010.

    Other job categories were hit just as hard. The number of bookkeepers fell 26%, word processors and typists, 63%; travel agents, 46%; and telephone operators, 64%.

    Online services like banking have wiped out many teller jobs; self-service checkout lanes have whittled away at cashier jobs.

    Utilities have installed smart meters that eliminate the need for meter readers.

    And technology that's just now becoming available, such as self-driving cars, could upend several industries, destroying the jobs of more than 3 million truck drivers, 573,000 bus drivers, and 342,000 taxi and limo drivers.

    That could easily extend to other forms of transportation, such as commercial airliners, trains and ships.

    Even jobs that require college degrees, including in such areas as finance and human resources, will be affected.

    Online education will disrupt the traditional university model and could put a lot of professors out of work. And many foresee diagnostic robots in the healthcare sector that could reduce the number of healthcare professionals needed.

    "There's no sector of the economy that's going to get a pass," Martin Ford, who wrote "The Lights in the Tunnel," a book predicting widespread job losses, told the Associated Press. "It's everywhere."

    read more at http://moneymorning.com/2013/02/04/robots-taking-jobs-from-every-sector-of-the-economy/

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  8. I will encourage my grandchildren and anyone else who will not listen to think of profitable activities to engage in. Of course that might well be without the profitable activities to engage in. Prostitution comes to mind, lol, but I hear tell the robots can do that better without the headaches and they are always ready to try something new if they are programmed to.

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  9. The smoke screen is your lie that this is intentionally caused by Obama and that this is socialism. We know that is a power word you used to use to call citizens into action, even to be conscripted and die forlornly in a foreign land for naught. I'll tell you where the intentionality lies. It lies with the free market, as if the invisible hand could be intentional. The invisible hand cannot be seen so it cannot be intentional, can it? It will smack us all hard in the ass. Perhaps that will wake us up.

    The reality is that the free market economy, as we understand it today, simply cannot work without a viable labor market. Jobs are the primary mechanism through which income—and, therefore, purchasing power—is distributed to the people who consume everything the economy produces. If at some point, machines are likely to permanently take over a great deal of the work now performed by human beings, then that will be a threat to the very foundation of our economic system. This is not something that will just work itself out. This is something that we need to begin thinking about—and that is the primary subject of this book.

    Read more at http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/excerpt.htm

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  10. I use socialism as a power word because there is no substitute for freedom.

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  11. You seem not to give a flying diddly about the fact that we're living in tyranny and planned decline

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  12. My sense is that your robot alarmists' argument is leading to the conclusion that some kind of central-planning solution is called for

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  13. The National Association of Manufacturers gets it: http://www.nam.org/Data-and-Reports/Total-Cost-of-Regulation/

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  14. So does the NFIB: http://www.nfib.com/article/?cmsid=58652

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  15. http://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-and-gas-regulatory-push-coming-from-obama-administration-1419890081

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  16. The restaurant industry gets it, too:

    http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/News/NRA-on-overtime-Dont-redefine-management

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