U.S. Industrial Production Rises for a Fifth Month - why GOP have to kill UI Benefits Extension

[Bill USA]

....it looks like the recovery is finally starting to get underway despite the GOP's efforts to kill it with a Government shutdown, threat of Government default and obstruction of 4.3 million jobs.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014700288

[elleng]

1. 'Recovery' has been moving,

in a positive direction for a long time, but at a snail's pace due to repug recalcitrance. Nothing new here, imo.

[Bill USA]

2. by 'get underway' I meant starting to get underway under it's own power - not entirely yet , thus

the need for continued stimulus by the Fed. But they are trimming the amount of bonds they will be buying because it looks like the economy is starting to get some momentum of it's own. That's why it's so important to the Repugnants to not let extending UI benefits pass.. By stopping this they will be throwing another anchor over the side to try to sabotage the recovery.

Yes, nothing new, but I like noting it as I don't think we should get so used to Repugnants sabotaging the economy that it doesn't even warrant noting it anymore. I want to always comment on their manifold perfidies.

[elleng]

3. Gotcha.

Imagine the momentum from infrastructure improvements!

[Bill USA]

4. and something which is so desperately needed. But more important to Repugnants is to drag down the

economy to prevent an obvious and what would have been (if it could have been done with the amount of stimulus needed) an expeditious recovery to the Supply Side Trickle Down disaster - engineered by Democrats following Keynesian principles. The Repugs couldn't allow their embarrassing disaster to be followed by the further humiliation of having their disaster fixed using methods straight out of Keynesian economics.

[Potomac Oracle]

5. Does this look like recovery?

Corrected Retail Sales. The first graph following reflects real retail sales as usually reported by the St. Louis Fed, deflated by the CPI-U, but it is indexed to January 2000 = 100. ShadowStats did the deflation using the December 2013 CPI-U and nominal retail sales releases. The CPI-U, however, understates inflation (see the Public Comment on Inflation), with the effect of overstating inflation-adjusted growth.

Instead of being deflated by the CPI-U, the “corrected” real retail sales numbers in the second graph use the ShadowStats-Alternate Inflation Measure (1990-Base) for deflation.

With the higher inflation of the ShadowStats measure, the revamped numbers show a pattern of plunge and stagnation, consistent with patterns seen in real median household income, consumer confidence measures, unemployment and housing statistics. A topping out in late-2011 and early-2012 reverted to renewed decline in second-quarter 2012 in this series, which had been bottom-bouncing along a low-level plateau of economic activity since the economic collapse from 2006 into 2009. The renewed contraction has been deepening. Although the October and November 2013 sales numbers ticked higher, December activity has turned lower, again.

http://www.shadowstats.com/article/no-592-december-cpi-real-retail-sales-and-earnings


Early December Data Suggest Some Slowing Activity. Lingering distortions in economic reporting—from the government shutdown—should resolve themselves in the next month or two. Today’s (January 10th) Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) release on December 2013 labor conditions may have been an early example of reporting catch-up, with both payroll- and household-survey details turning increasingly consistent with a renewed downturn in broad economic activity.

The decline in the headline U.3 unemployment rate, from 7.0% to 6.7%, was not good news. The large drop in the number of unemployed mostly reflected people becoming “discouraged” and being statistically removed from the headline labor force, instead of finding jobs and returning to work. The increasing flow of discouraged workers through the broader U.6 measure, into the ShadowStats-Alternate Unemployment measure, boosted the ShadowStats unemployment rate to 23.3% from a revised 23.1%.

http://www.shadowstats.com/article/no-589-december-employment-and-unemployment-money-supply-m3

The above is from www.shadowstats.com

[Bill USA]

6. this is a Republican Dystopia.. the result of committed obstruction of all job creating

.. stimulus bills proposed by the President. The Republicans have done a very good job of damn near preventing/killing any recovery to their Trickle Down Deregulation Disaster that the president and the Dems tried to stimulate. Along with the original stimulus bill (passed without one Republican vote) Bernanke's extraordinary efforts at the FED has saved the economy from sinking back into the Second Great Depression.... (too bad GOP). But they can feel a sense of accomplishment in that they have delayed the incipient recovery (their are signs of a recovery that is starting to get its own momentum such as growing industrial production for one) by at least two years.

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Natural Born Job Killers: Republicans Obstruct over 4.2 million jobs [/font]
http://www.politicususa.com/2012/07/11/natural-born-job-killers-republicans-obstruct-4-2-million-jobs.html

The only failure in Republican attempts to totally destroy the economy was their inability to obstruct the President’s stimulus the Congressional Budget Office and several independent agencies claim created over 3 million jobs. However, they have made up for that success by refusing to consider President Obama’s American Jobs Act proposed over a year-and-a-half ago, and coupled with severe austerity measures at the state and local level, they have been successful maintaining unemployment at over 8% instead of less-than 6% if they were not intent on obstruction and economic devastation.

There is no doubt the Republicans know what works to improve hiring and economic growth because every Republican administration has invested in hiring more public employees during a recession, and they always depended on federal funding to increase the workforce at the federal and state level, and not giving more tax breaks to their imaginary “job creators” they claim leads to full employment. The GOP austerity measures were not limited to blocking federal money to help states hire and retain employees, because states with Republican governors and legislatures made drastic cuts in the public sector workforce and many turned down federal aid to demonstrate their contempt for their residents, and the federal government. In California, for example, a Republican in Congress, Jeff Denham, is attempting to block implementation of a much needed high-speed rail project that will create over a million jobs as the largest earth-moving project in the state’s history, and sustain hundreds-of-thousands more jobs for maintenance and operation in cities up and down the state. His argument is that the government cannot afford the cost and the money is better spent creating jobs…with more tax cuts for “job creators.”

The austerity measures Republicans are implementing have never worked during a recession and despite the abject failure of every European country that enacted austerity, they are hell-bent on following the countries that have no growth and soaring unemployment. Even the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Willard Romney, admitted that austerity during a recession is disastrous, and yet Republicans have killed over 600,000 public sector jobs that prevented 2.3 million downstream jobs from being created. Coupled with Republican obstruction of the President’s job plan in January 2011, they have effectively prevented 4.2 million Americans from finding good, living wage jobs, or enough to bring the unemployment rate down to 5.5% in a little over a year. Instead of cutting 600,000 teaching, police, firefighter and other public jobs, if states had increased those lost jobs by one-half, the unemployment rate would be under 5% and tax revenue would be up, the deficit would be reduced, and the economy would be humming along.

Republicans are now claiming that letting the Bush era tax cuts for the rich expire will kill more jobs, but the facts, and history, do not bear out their fallacious assertions. During the Clinton Administration, the wealthy paid 3% more in taxes and the economy added 22-million jobs, wages increased, and businesses boomed. In fact, during the Eisenhower Administration, the wealthy paid nearly 90% in taxes during the time when hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned from World War II, and the infusion of cash created the nation’s highway system, a booming economy, and the great middle class. The GOP knows how to create jobs, but they have no interest in America’s economy, or its people and they must relish the thought of killing jobs and retarding economic growth as they planned in 2009, and will continue throughout 2012.
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Unemployment would be 1% LOWER without Government Cuts - Wall Street Journal - May 2012[/font]
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/05/08/unemployment-rate-without-government-cuts-7-1/

One reason the unemployment rate may have remained persistently high: The sharp cuts in state and local government spending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the layoffs those cuts wrought.
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The Labor Department’s establishment survey of employers — the jobs count that it bases its payroll figures on — shows that the government has been steadily shedding workers since the crisis struck, with 586,000 fewer jobs than in December 2008. Friday’s employment report showed the cuts continued in April, with 15,000 government jobs lost.

But the survey of households that the unemployment rate is based on suggests the government job cuts have been much, much worse.

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The unemployment rate would be far lower if it hadn’t been for those cuts: If there were as many people working in government as there were in December 2008, the unemployment rate in April would have been 7.1%, not 8.1%.
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.. Remember cuts to Government programs was the price Republicans demanded to cooperate in increasing the debt limit (ordinarily, historically a routine vote) and to stop them from causing a U.S. default on its debt.

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Without GOP Unemployment would be under 6%[/font]
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/08/1107585/-Without-GOP-Unemployment-would-be-under-6

The GOP has been on an economic wrecking mission ever since the election of Barack Obama - indeed we now know that leading Republican strategists and legislators met and planned a course of economic sabotage and complete obstruction on Obama's very first day in office.

This obstruction has had a huge price - a deliberate price that the GOP is betting the American people will blame on President Obama. GOP obstruction did not prevent the passage of ARRA - the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - popularly know as "The Stimulus" bill of 2009 during the height of the economic disaster as the economy was falling off a cliff - the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that ARRA has saved up to 3 million jobs. But nearly every economic measure since then has been blocked by GOP obstruction, filibusters and brinksmanship.


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President Obama proposed the American Jobs Act in his 2011 State of the Union address, and spent the next year promoting it at every opportunity. Although expensive - it contained a combination of targeted tax cuts and some tax increases, along with direct spending designed to increase consumer spending and lower the cost to business of hiring new workers, all while paying for the bill. The CBO said the bill would not only have paid for itself within 10 years, but would have reduced the deficit by at least 6 billion dollars. According to an analysis by Moody's it would have created about 1.9 million jobs.

The result of GOP obstruction with those two things cost us 2.3 million jobs and 1.9 million jobs respectively. US employment as of May 2011 is about 155 million jobs, which means those 4.2 million jobs that the GOP has prevented account for 2.7% of the unemployment rate. But let's be fair, there is a small amount of overlap in those jobs - a small portion (about 8%) of the American Jobs Act would have gone to State and Local governments to pay for teachers, first responders and the like - although for the most part it would have just prevented further layoffs rather than resulted in new hires. It is also very likely that without the economic wrecking of GOP obstructionism the labor participation rate would be higher - so instead of a reduction of unemployment to 5.5% it would be slightly higher, but still well under 6%.



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Obstruct and Exploit - Krugman Sept 2012[/font]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/opinion/krugman-obstruct-and-exploit.html?_r=0

Does anyone remember the American Jobs Act? A year ago President Obama proposed boosting the economy with a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, aimed in particular at sustaining state and local government employment. Independent analysts reacted favorably. For example, the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimated that the act would add 1.3 million jobs by the end of 2012.

There were good reasons for these positive assessments. Although you’d never know it from political debate, worldwide experience since the financial crisis struck in 2008 has overwhelmingly confirmed the proposition that fiscal policy “works,” that temporary increases in spending boost employment in a depressed economy (and that spending cuts increase unemployment). The Jobs Act would have been just what the doctor ordered.

But the bill went nowhere, of course, blocked by Republicans in Congress. And now, having prevented Mr. Obama from implementing any of his policies, those same Republicans are pointing to disappointing job numbers and declaring that the president’s policies have failed.

Think of it as a two-part strategy. First, obstruct any and all efforts to strengthen the economy, then exploit the economy’s weakness for political gain. If this strategy sounds cynical, that’s because it is. Yet it’s the G.O.P.’s best chance for victory in November.
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[Bill USA]

7. more than 60% of U.S. CEOs expect to hire more in 2014

http://www.democraticunderground.com/111646974

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/01/21/ceos-see-brighter-economic-times-ahead/4736451/


In Davos, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a survey of 1,300 chief executive officers worldwide showing 44% expect the world economy to improve over the next 12 months. A year ago, only 18% said that about 2013's outlook.

More than 60% of the U.S. CEOs in the survey said they expect to hire more people this year. That's the highest level of headcount additions in the past five years of PwC's global CEO surveys, the firm said.

In Washington, the International Monetary Fund raised its forecast for both world and U.S. economic growth in 2014.

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"The IMF is moving in our direction, and in the direction of the Federal Reserve. They're catching up with everyone," Englund said.
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IMF upgrades world growth forecast to 3.7% in 2014
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101350524

...the IMF said it was vital that advanced economies avoided halting ultra-loose monetary policies too early.

"It will be critical to avoid a premature withdrawal of monetary policy accommodation, including in the United States, as output gaps are still large while inflation is low and fiscal consolidation continues. Stronger growth is needed to complete balance sheet repair after the crisis and to lower related legacy risks," it said.
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