Another Republican President, Another Recession.
- Thread starter hanimmal
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Sucks for pubs when you're able to point to metrics.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
194,000 (before revisions which were all upward during Biden's presidency) in September and 531,000 in October, put's Biden at about 5.2 million jobs since he took over the office of the presidency 9 months ago.
Shit that puts him on pace to have about 27,700,000 in 4 years, which would be more than Clinton had in 8, which is bigger than anyone else since Truman at least. Things likely will slow down, but still.
Pretty impressive, wonder if the right wing will be able to con their cult into thinking that it would be a smart move to put the Republicans in charge again to cause another recession like they have been doing for over 100 years.
Hate to say it, but the transfer or wealth happens in waves with each economic "cycle" and they crush it when they break things and crush it again when Dems fix things. Markets don't necessarily need to go up to make money, they just needs to move, and it's always easier to make it go down than up. They're really good at flushing our cash down the drain and plumbing it into their hands.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Luckily though we are starting to have enough data from all the Republican recessions in the last 60 years to understand their economic shenanigans.
The big challenge is to start figuring out what they are going to try to use to keep their ability to tank the economy next. The 90's saw them turning up the propaganda campaign and solidifying their hold on hate radio and tv against the Democratic party. The 2000's added to it the internet attack on our society and fanatical increase in religion and racism politicization. Then after Obama it was using this to ramp up their astroturf Tea Party state election so that they could gerrymander themselves into power for the next decade. Which ultimately got hijacked by Trump and the Russian military to sneak him into office and radicalization of our citizens being isolated and sucked into online information bubbles.
And now we look to be in another decade of gerrymandering to go along with the court stuffing.
What is the next Republican con? Where do they go from here. I hope that they die off and have to rebuild as a non-troll party, but it is not looking good if there is no real change happening in the online propaganda war that is being waged on us.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/14/inflation-prices-supply-chain/
The decrease in October from last year's Republican led recession is showing up this month in a bigger increase. November should also see a bit larger inflation rate, and then it should start to decline before it starts to drastically decrease in May 2022 and start to move through the larger inflation rates.
I think this chart is going to be the one that is most useful in seeing how inflation is going to go.The bumpy economic recovery has had policymakers, economists and Americans at large grappling with greater price hikes for groceries, gas, cars, rent and just about everything else we need.
For months, officials at the Federal Reserve and White House have argued that pandemic-era inflation won’t become a permanent feature of the economy, and that prices will simmer back down as the economy has time to heal. The hope was that inflation would have started cooling down by now.
But persistent supply chain backlogs and, most recently, the delta variant of the coronavirus, have kept prices elevated. There is no clear answer for when that will change, leaving Americans to feel the strain in their pocketbooks in the meantime. This is a breakdown of how we got here.
Policymakers were encouraged when August prices eased slightly, breaking an eight-month streak of rising or steady inflation. But September reversed course, coming in at 5.4 percent compared to the year before, in large part due to the rapidly spreading delta variant stifling the recovery. Now October showed even shaper inflation, with prices rising 6.2 percent compared to the year before.
Economists caution against drawing too much from one month of data, good or bad. But the overall picture increasingly suggests that inflation is sticking around longer than economic policymakers at the Fed and White House anticipated just a few months ago.
Policymakers often argue that price increases are limited to industries like hotels, airlines and cars. But federal data on Wednesday showed “broad-based” higher prices, propelled by not just energy and used cars, but by shelter, food and new vehicles. Prices for medical care, for household furnishing and operations, and for recreation all increased in October.
The concerns over soaring home prices and rising rents have economists worried about whether cost increases will last even after the pandemic has mostly passed. The still hot housing market has made it that much more difficult for first-time buyers, or those without cash or solid credit, to buy a home. Meanwhile, rising rents in major metropolitan areas are pushing out more people who are now wondering if they can afford to stay.
The market relies heavily on trade-ins and auto parts, which have been in low supply amid a global microchip shortage.
That pinch has made it more expensive for dealers to get any of their models, much less repair them. All of those problems are also hurting the supply of used cars, which depend on trade ins as well as rental car company inventories.
Meanwhile, the pandemic triggered a massive rental car shortage after a slew of large companies sold off hundreds of thousands of models that sat idle at the start of the pandemic as Americans stopped traveling. Back in May of this year, more than one of every three rental cars that had been in service before the pandemic was no longer available.
However, as more people got vaccinated and started itching for spring and summer trips, customer demand boomed. Companies could not get their hands on cars fast enough, driving up prices while people scrambled for reservations and companies rushed to restock lots.
New cars are now also seeing rising prices thanks to the ongoing microchip shortage. Pandemic-related shutdowns have pinched factories around the world. For instance, auto production in North America was recently slowed by shutdowns in countries like Malaysia and Vietnam.
Families across the nation are also facing higher prices at the grocery store, which have people stretching their wallets for dairy, fruits and vegetables, baked goods and meats. Prices for meat, poultry, fish and eggs have surged in particular above other grocery categories. The White House has pointed to broad consolidation in the meat industry, saying that large companies bear some of the responsibility for pushing prices higher.
Meat industry groups disagree, arguing that the same supply-side issues rampant in the rest of the economy apply to proteins because it costs more to transport and package materials, while labor shortages have held back meat production.
The decrease in October from last year's Republican led recession is showing up this month in a bigger increase. November should also see a bit larger inflation rate, and then it should start to decline before it starts to drastically decrease in May 2022 and start to move through the larger inflation rates.
Fogdog
Well-Known Member
Trick question.
During the first year of any president, inflation, jobs growth, GDP, and most of the budget are mostly due to actions taken during the previous administration. 6% (annualized) inflation this month? Thank you Trump.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Well if Biden was to have done the Republican playbook that was championed by Reagan, where Volker in the Federal reserve jacked up interest rates halting any new economic activity in new business investment and home building (Homes that after 30 years were being sold by the white people who got those cheap as shit federal loans), which is also when all those manufacturing jobs started moving overseas.
Hammered the workers ability to use the inflation to increase their wages through union busting. Ending the federal mental health system costing how many people their jobs, ect. All of which drastically increased the unemployment rates (especially in minority areas) that meant there was less pressure on supply due to people not having any money.
This halt in economic activity stopped the inflation cold.
I am pretty happy Biden did not go down this route, and instead stabilized the economy and is not freaking out trying to kill inflation at the expense of all of us. It might mean that the wealthiest in our nation won't be able to vacuum up all those distressed properties, and (gasp) actually have to increase wages.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/opinion/reagan-social-welfare.html
With Build Back Better, President Biden has attempted to revive a New Deal ethic that entwines human and physical infrastructure. No one likes taxes, but building a nation where Americans know that their families are safe and cared for is popular across party lines. It shouldn’t have been a hard sell.
But here we are. The reconciliation package has shrunk to about $2 trillion. And something else is gone: a chance to change the American narrative of what good government does. The legislation was once billed as a plan for sweeping once-in-a-generation social change, but aspects of it that warranted that hyperbole, like dental and vision coverage for Medicare recipients and free community college, have disappeared. Paid family and medical leave have been sharply reduced.
Other industrialized nations provide a far more robust safety net than the one we have and even the one Mr. Biden proposed. Yet Republicans and at least one Democrat insist that such social welfare spending endangers the nation’s fiscal and moral health.
How did we get to a point that doing less for Americans is a virtue, and comprehensive social welfare a privilege?
It goes back to Jan. 20, 1981. On that cold, windy day, Ronald Reagan, who had scoffed at mythical female welfare cheats on the campaign trail, a trope he had revisited since his 1966 campaign for governor of California, took the oath of office. The defeated Democratic President Jimmy Carter, also on the dais, shared some of Mr. Reagan’s distaste for social spending. During his presidency, Mr. Carter charged Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano Jr. with creating “pro-work and pro-family” rules for recipients (though they never went through).
Mr. Reagan went further. In his inaugural speech, he linked government itself to national decline. The economic crisis of the 1970s, he declared, was “proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.” Social programs were wasteful. Worse, they lured families into dependence.
In other words: The government that helps families most helps them least. It was an idea that became an American ethic, with staying power through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Attacks on social programs portrayed poverty as a moral failure and exploited racist stereotypes to mischaracterize social welfare as a magnet for criminal, failed and indolent Americans. The belief that successful families helped themselves remained an article of faith in both parties until the socialist Senator Bernie Sanders ran for president.
Under Mr. Reagan, conservatives were finally able to begin dismantling the New Deal state and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. In 1981 and 1982, Mr. Reagan made more than $22 billion in cuts to social welfare programs, including federal student loans and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a modest program that paid businesses to train and hire economically disadvantaged people.
The federal deficit grew anyway, as Mr. Reagan cut taxes and accelerated military spending. Inheriting a national debt of about $995 billion, he nearly tripled it. But conservative activists still cheered.
In fact, Mr. Reagan’s welfare reforms just made the poor poorer. When a three-year recession hit in 1980, six million more Americans fell into poverty. By 1989, employment recovered, but a weak social safety net meant that workers were an illness or an accident away from hardship.
Democrats were complicit. In 1992, although he would try (but fail) to pass national health care, Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it.” Looking to a second term, he later blasted big government. The bipartisan Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 put mothers to work at low-wage jobs without health care benefits, linked food aid to work, established a five-year lifetime limit on benefits paid by federal money and funded sexual abstinence programs, not reproductive health. By 1999, single mothers on “workfare” had sunk deeper into poverty.
Progressive Democrats did only marginally better. In 2012, Republicans accused President Barack Obama of unwindingdecades of welfare-to-work provisions, with a new system of waivers, work requirements and block grants that states had to follow. And while his Affordable Care Act passed narrowly, under pressure from both parties, he abandoned universal health care.
Today the poverty rate hovers around 11 percent, about where it was in 1973, and economic insecurity now envelops the working poor and middle class. Some economists now argue that the misery caused by decades of failure to support working families paved the way for Donald Trump’s presidency.
That may be true. Left to fend for themselves in poorly regulated markets, by default, working Americans do care for themselves — often on credit. Medical debt was recently pegged at $140 billionand student loans at over $1.7 trillion. Thirteen million workershave more than one job.
Americans work hard, but in the United States it costs money even to go to work. Child care, if parents can find it, can cost more than a mortgage payment. Elder care? Even more. Despite the Affordable Care Act, 28 million Americans are left uninsured.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-technology-business-broadband-internet-ad2c86ce1bc6e85322f2629d7a72732e
WASHINGTON (AP) — The $1 trillion infrastructure plan that President Joe Biden plans to sign into law has money for roads, bridges, ports, rail transit, safe water, the power grid, broadband internet and more.
The plan promises to reach almost every corner of the country. It’s a historic investment that the president has compared to the building of the transcontinental railroad and Interstate Highway System. The White House is projecting that the investments will add, on average, about 2 million jobs per year over the coming decade.
The bill cleared the House on a 228-206 vote Nov. 5, ending weeks of intraparty negotiations in which liberal Democrats insisted the legislation be tied to a larger social spending bill — an effort to press more moderate Democrats to support both.
The Senate passed the legislation on a 69-30 vote in August after rare bipartisan negotiations, and the House kept that compromise intact. Thirteen House Republicans voted for the bill, giving Democrats more than enough votes to overcome a handful of defections from progressives.
A breakdown of the bill expected to become law Monday:
ROADS AND BRIDGES
The bill would provide $110 billion to repair the nation’s aging highways, bridges and roads. According to the White House, 173,000 total miles or nearly 280,000 kilometers of America’s highways and major roads and 45,000 bridges are in poor condition. The almost $40 billion for bridges is the single largest dedicated bridge investment since the construction of the national highway system, according to the Biden administration.
PUBLIC TRANSIT
The $39 billion for public transit in the legislation would expand transportation systems, improve accessibility for people with disabilities and provide dollars to state and local governments to buy zero-emission and low-emission buses. The Transportation Department estimates that the current repair backlog is more than 24,000 buses, 5,000 rail cars, 200 stations and thousands of miles of track and power systems.
PASSENGER AND FREIGHT RAIL
To reduce Amtrak’s maintenance backlog, which has worsened since Superstorm Sandy nine years ago, the bill would provide $66 billion to improve the rail service’s Northeast Corridor (457 miles, 735 km), as well as other routes. It’s less than the $80 billion originally sought by Biden — who famously rode Amtrak from Delaware to Washington during his time in the Senate — but it would be the largest federal investment in passenger rail service since Amtrak was founded 50 years ago.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES
The bill would spend $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations, which the administration says are critical to accelerating the use of electric vehicles to curb climate change. It would also provide $5 billion for the purchase of electric school buses and hybrids, reducing reliance on school buses that run on diesel fuel.
INTERNET ACCESS
The legislation’s $65 billion for broadband access would aim to improve internet services for rural areas, low-income families and tribal communities. Most of the money would be made available through grants to states.
MODERNIZING THE ELECTRIC GRID
To protect against the power outages that have become more frequent in recent years, the bill would spend $65 billion to improve the reliability and resiliency of the power grid. It would also boost carbon capture technologies and more environmentally friendly electricity sources like clean hydrogen.
AIRPORTS
The bill would spend $25 billion to improve runways, gates and taxiways at airports and to improve terminals. It would also improve aging air traffic control towers.
WATER AND WASTEWATER
The legislation would spend $55 billion on water and wastewater infrastructure. It has $15 billion to replace lead pipes and $10 billion to address water contamination from polyfluoroalkyl substances — chemicals that were used in the production of Teflon and have also been used in firefighting foam, water-repellent clothing and many other items.
PAYING FOR IT
The five-year spending package would be paid for by tapping $210 billion in unspent COVID-19 relief aid and $53 billion in unemployment insurance aid some states have halted, along with an array of smaller pots of money, like petroleum reserve sales and spectrum auctions for 5G services.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The $1 trillion infrastructure plan that President Joe Biden plans to sign into law has money for roads, bridges, ports, rail transit, safe water, the power grid, broadband internet and more.
The plan promises to reach almost every corner of the country. It’s a historic investment that the president has compared to the building of the transcontinental railroad and Interstate Highway System. The White House is projecting that the investments will add, on average, about 2 million jobs per year over the coming decade.
The bill cleared the House on a 228-206 vote Nov. 5, ending weeks of intraparty negotiations in which liberal Democrats insisted the legislation be tied to a larger social spending bill — an effort to press more moderate Democrats to support both.
The Senate passed the legislation on a 69-30 vote in August after rare bipartisan negotiations, and the House kept that compromise intact. Thirteen House Republicans voted for the bill, giving Democrats more than enough votes to overcome a handful of defections from progressives.
A breakdown of the bill expected to become law Monday:
ROADS AND BRIDGES
The bill would provide $110 billion to repair the nation’s aging highways, bridges and roads. According to the White House, 173,000 total miles or nearly 280,000 kilometers of America’s highways and major roads and 45,000 bridges are in poor condition. The almost $40 billion for bridges is the single largest dedicated bridge investment since the construction of the national highway system, according to the Biden administration.
PUBLIC TRANSIT
The $39 billion for public transit in the legislation would expand transportation systems, improve accessibility for people with disabilities and provide dollars to state and local governments to buy zero-emission and low-emission buses. The Transportation Department estimates that the current repair backlog is more than 24,000 buses, 5,000 rail cars, 200 stations and thousands of miles of track and power systems.
PASSENGER AND FREIGHT RAIL
To reduce Amtrak’s maintenance backlog, which has worsened since Superstorm Sandy nine years ago, the bill would provide $66 billion to improve the rail service’s Northeast Corridor (457 miles, 735 km), as well as other routes. It’s less than the $80 billion originally sought by Biden — who famously rode Amtrak from Delaware to Washington during his time in the Senate — but it would be the largest federal investment in passenger rail service since Amtrak was founded 50 years ago.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES
The bill would spend $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations, which the administration says are critical to accelerating the use of electric vehicles to curb climate change. It would also provide $5 billion for the purchase of electric school buses and hybrids, reducing reliance on school buses that run on diesel fuel.
INTERNET ACCESS
The legislation’s $65 billion for broadband access would aim to improve internet services for rural areas, low-income families and tribal communities. Most of the money would be made available through grants to states.
MODERNIZING THE ELECTRIC GRID
To protect against the power outages that have become more frequent in recent years, the bill would spend $65 billion to improve the reliability and resiliency of the power grid. It would also boost carbon capture technologies and more environmentally friendly electricity sources like clean hydrogen.
AIRPORTS
The bill would spend $25 billion to improve runways, gates and taxiways at airports and to improve terminals. It would also improve aging air traffic control towers.
WATER AND WASTEWATER
The legislation would spend $55 billion on water and wastewater infrastructure. It has $15 billion to replace lead pipes and $10 billion to address water contamination from polyfluoroalkyl substances — chemicals that were used in the production of Teflon and have also been used in firefighting foam, water-repellent clothing and many other items.
PAYING FOR IT
The five-year spending package would be paid for by tapping $210 billion in unspent COVID-19 relief aid and $53 billion in unemployment insurance aid some states have halted, along with an array of smaller pots of money, like petroleum reserve sales and spectrum auctions for 5G services.
