"The US economy gained a strong 209,000 jobs in July, more than economists had expected. The unemployment rate fell to 4.3%, matching a 16-year low. Just after the Great Recession in 2009, unemployment peaked at 10%. Many economists say the United States is at or near 'full employment,' meaning the unemployment rate won't go down significantly more...."
A "Breaking News" email from CNN, just received.
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Now let's start seeing the long-term unemployed start coming back into the workforce. That would really be something.
I still work several days a week, and can attest that the optimism has grown and grown the past months. The people with money to invest are going all in looking for investments and that is driving price up. The more the merrier say the lawyers. They need us again too.
Many economists say the United States is at or near 'full employment,' meaning the unemployment rate won't go down significantly more...." A "Breaking News" email from CNN, just received.
Oh please, oh please, oh please!!!! A thought from CNN, just expressed.
Um, okay. The continuation of a trend that quite naturally began at the depths of the 2009-10 recession.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e201b7c8c4aa63970b-500wi
I'm not arguing that Trump has done anything to harm the economy. He may have done some things to help it. But is anyone going to seriously claim that these latest employment numbers should be credited to Trump? After barely two quarters?
I suppose I should have called it the "2007-2009 recession." Whatever. The 2008 Liquidity Crisis, perhaps? You pick a name.
Dems must hate this. The more people work, the more money they make, the more freedom, independence and power they assume over their own affairs, the less they need social welfare programs ... the less they need the Democrat Party.
Just sayin'
At work right now a coworker said that Obama should get all of the credit because Republicans have not passed any legislation or a budget and President Trump has been a big "Nothing Burger."
I had to restrain myself from punching this coworker in the face.
Time to thin the disability rolls, which skyrocketed after the unemployment benefits expired.
Assuming it is true that we have added a million jobs in the past six months, what kind of jobs are they? Part-time jobs? Service jobs, (i.e., clerks and food servers)? Temp jobs? Short-term jobs? Jobs driving for Uber or Lyft? Or permanent jobs with good pay and benefits? There are many poor people who have jobs, so asserting simply that the nation added a million jobs--again, assuming this is true and is an actual net gain--does not give a real picture of how well the employment situation is truly faring.
(Have we forgotten that prediction of mere months ago that 47% of jobs will disappear in the next 25 years?)
I'm not arguing that Trump has done anything to harm the economy.
Well that's might big of you.
He may have done some things to help it. But is anyone going to seriously claim that these latest employment numbers should be credited to Trump? After barely two quarters?
Yep, maybe he did. And after only two quarters at that. Wait 'til you see the US economy after two terms.
"At work right now a coworker said that Obama should get all of the credit because Republicans have not passed any legislation or a budget and President Trump has been a big "Nothing Burger."
"I had to restrain myself from punching this coworker in the face."
My, how violent you must be. Why? You can't handle the truth?
(About the Republicans having not done anything and Trump being a "nothing burger," that is. I don't know that Obama is due credit for anything, as, again, we don't know the reality of the jobs situation for Americans out there based simply on a claim of a million jobs added in recent months.)
Ralph L said...
Time to thin the disability rolls, which skyrocketed after the unemployment benefits expired.
You are right. SSDI is one of the most colossal American government scandals of our time. It would be interesting to see Trump invest himself in that. Some of the heaviest SSDI counties are in the heart of midwestern and mid-south Trump Territory.
Can you imagine what our economy can do if POTUS gets some cooperation and support?
Robert Cook denies reality can be proven to exist.
Chuck denies that President Trump deserves any credit for anything.
The sun rises in the East and sets in the West.
Enjoy your respective Fridays.
There is some false equivalence in looking at the unemployment rate and jobs created as similar measures. People stop being counted in the U3 number because they stop receiving benefits or age out of the workforce, both of which also shrink the number...
I see the two strong quarters of job creation as a large result of pent up demand from businesses waiting out the Obama years. (I'd argue even Hillary was a better alternative to Obama). Pro growth, Pro business Presidents tend to do that...
Obama should get all of the credit because Republicans have not passed any legislation or a budget...
This person chooses to ignore the chilling effect of excessive regulation from the Obama years. Reversing that chill has not taken either a new budget or new legislation from Trump.
Now Is the Time! said...
At work right now a coworker said that Obama should get all of the credit because Republicans have not passed any legislation or a budget and President Trump has been a big "Nothing Burger."
I had to restrain myself from punching this coworker in the face.
Super-duper kudos to you on restraining yourself. Gotta be tough, being you. What a provocation! Making a statement (true, right?) that Trump hasn't signed any major tax reform legislation, or health care reform legislation, or a budget. (All of which would be taking effect in 2018-19, right?
Person obviously deserved a punch in the face for that. But for your self-restraint.
Why am I not surprised that our cranky little LLR wants to give Obama credit for the economy?
Even leftists partisans, if they are honest with themselves, have to admit that Trump's election unleashed the animal spirits of the market. Another way to put it is that when Obama retired and Hillary lost, the economy was greatly stimulated.
Trump has made some good moves on deregulation. Now he needs to get Congress to cut capital gains taxes.
Four sentence paragraph:
First sentence says economists predictions were wrong.
Last sentence offers more predictions by economists.
All. Investing in new machines and renovated structures and employees is a bet on the business it is being built to service being there in 18 months. It is Faith.
Under Commie-Muslim Obama who was intentionally destroying our future, that was an impossible dream. But under The Donald it is a tangible movement that is picking up momentum after years of depression.
If jobs are created under a Dem administration, "we did it!"
If jobs are created under a GOP administration, "you didn't build that!"
The Morning Joe crew seemed less than enthusiastic, and had plenty of "yea, buts", followed by immediately going back to why anybody associated with Trump sucks. The good economics news was handled just as it would have been under an Obama administration. Ha, I know, I'm just kidding.
Now Is the Time! said...
I had to restrain myself from punching this coworker in the face.
Strictly speaking, you didn't have to.
Watching the CNBC dorks try to unexplain how these numbers were good for POTUS was entertaining.
Per zerohedge seems jobs requiring lower education.
Trump is doing a lot of deregulating that will help. Reduction in illegal immigration may be causing some of this.
Key issues longer term:
- immigration
- e verify
- regulations
- housing bubble
- real inflation rate
- college tuition costs
- automation
Other countries are similarly experiencing low jobless rates back to pre-crisis levels, and in the case of March data in the U.K., back to 1975. A Bloomberg headline today is "Canadian Job Market Runs Hot With Unemployment at 9-Year Low". I'm no economist, but this suggests to me that we have a general global trajectory of recovery from 2008, and attributing it to 6 months of Trump is probably wishful thinking.
Watching the CNBC dorks try to unexplain how these numbers were good for POTUS was entertaining.
That Andrew Ross Sorkin guy said he'd literally eat crow if Trump achieved 3% annual growth. Can't wait to see that...
The emp to pop ratio has climbed to 60.2, highest since 2009, which is probably a more significant indicator.
This is good news. A strong Economy is great for all Americans. Even the whining Democrats (but are there any other kind?) and Chuck "I heard it on WNPR".
It is the same, tired old media playbook. Anything good that happens during a R administration is a result of all of the "hard work" of the earlier D. Anything bad that happens during a D administration is a result of all of the "screw ups" of the earlier R.
As to jobs, all a President can do is slow/kill job creation. Presidents DON'T "make" jobs. They are politicians. All they can do is get in the way or get out of the way. That said, Trump is unique (recently) in that he is ALSO a business man. He has business interests that can create jobs. His biggest influence though is the reduction in Government burdens on business. This too does not "create" jobs but affects the business ROI on employment so they can justify adding employees.
"But is anyone going to seriously claim that these latest employment numbers should be credited to Trump?"
-- I don't, but considering CNN/the media would happily have hung an albatross around Trump's neck if they were bad, and were glad to give plaudits to Obama for when things were good, they kind of have to eat crow on this.
Person obviously deserved a punch in the face for that. But for your self-restraint.
Says the person who wanted to get in Don Jr's face for something his dad said.
Are you trying to parody yourself today Chuck, or is it just turning out that way?
Francisco D said...
Why am I not surprised that our cranky little LLR wants to give Obama credit for the economy?
Hey thanks for asking. My bible on daily political/economic news is the Wall Street Journal. Journal editors generally make the case that the recovery under Obama has probably been slower and shallower than what it could have been. I give Obama some credit, but not a lot. I give the business cycle credit.
And I'll tell you who I'd really like to give credit to. It's Mitt Romney. Romney wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times about what a managed bankruptcy could do for Detroit automakers. In it, Romney expressed his love for cars. American cars. His father George Romney was the Chairman of American Motors before it merged with Chrysler. (George was then the governor of Michigan, then the Mexican-born Presidential candidate, then Secretary of HUD.)
Romney's NYT Op-Ed suggested a managed bankruptcy of Detroit automakers to shed legacy costs and restructure finances and re-do labor agreements. A Times editor gave it the headline "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt." And it haunted Romney through the 2012 campaign. Despite the fact that what Obama did with Chrysler and GM was to put them through a managed bankruptcy. (In Obama's managed bankruptcy, the unions' interests were carefully given precedence.) Romney was right. He was right from the start. Romney was right, when Michigan's two Democratic Senators and its Democratic governor went before microphones to denounce Romney and say to the world that a bankrupt automaker could never survive. About eight months before the Obama Administration did it.
Trump didn't create those jobs, we did, but what he did is take clear steps that tell me the government under him will start getting out of my way, and remove the fear for us employers that hiring people will be punished to the full extent of the law. Since Trump's election, I've doubled my investment in my company's future, opened a second location in Nevada, and started hiring additional people for the first time in years. I didn't do it just becuase of Trump, but his election gave me confidence that I'll have at least four years to get things done without additional unknown punishments being devised in Washington, DC. That might be overly optimistic, but I'm not gonna live forever, so you gotta take advantage of even a sliver of liberty and the momentum it creates.
"The pattern of job growth in 2017 remains essentially the same as in 2016. According to the Labor Department, an average of 184,000 jobs per month have been created this year, compared to 187,000 in 2016. If you eliminate January, when President Barack Obama was still in office, the monthly average is a somewhat lower 179,000."
It's odd though. Trump gets elected and almost the next day the stock market takes a jump and the employment situation improves. Totally Obama. Yeah.
That's the ticket. you
Kevin said...
Person obviously deserved a punch in the face for that. But for your self-restraint.
Says the person who wanted to get in Don Jr's face for something his dad said.
I didn't propose punching Don Jr. I proposed saying to him that his father is a hateful fucking liar, or something to that effect. Right?
Think I'll ever have to sign in, and place all of my metallic items in a plastic tray to do that in the future? Even if I have just 20 minutes and I am separated from Don Jr by a Plexiglas panel, I'd be good with that.
"Under Commie-Muslim Obama...."
Amazing you can see to type through the aluminum foil encasing your head to prevent the CIA's secret messages from getting into your head.
MadisonMan said...
This is good news. A strong Economy is great for all Americans. Even the whining Democrats (but are there any other kind?) and Chuck "I heard it on WNPR".
You gonna run me down over the Milo/NPR kefuffle?
What a disgrace that will be, for Milo, for Breitbart and, for what it's worth, Ann Althouse and her blog. Milo's story called out "NPR", used the NPR logo, and yet NPR was never involved in any editing, production or airing of the story.
Remarkably low-grade crappy fake news, courtesy of Milo, and re-broadcast courtesy of Drudge, Breitbart, Atlhouse and a hundred other mindless alt-right websites.
Obama had the slowest weakest recovery in modern history. We could have gotten to where we are today 5 years ago if we elected someone who respected the free market, or understood it's power. Imagine where we would be by now. Imagine not losing all that productivity and output that we burned up designing, building, implementing, learning, explaining, documenting and forcing onto our businesses and workers the giant Obamacare debacle of a wrong turn down a dead end that it was, not to mention all the people hired, and corruptly paid off to make it happen. At least a trillion dollars lost in cash, wasted time and lost productivity. You can't get back those years or dollars now. We essentially ran the wrong way on the track and have to turn around now.
Can we not squirrel *another* thread with a weeks old Chuck argument?
I get how this works. When the economy does well under a Democrat it's in spite of his policies. When it does well under a Republican, it's because of his policies.
I'm also amazed at how unemployment has gone down from 42% to around 4.3% in just six months without the passage of any major tax or employment related legislation: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/30/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-unemployment-rate-may-be-42-perc/
We came out of recession fairly quickly but there was no meaningful recovery as from earlier recessions. Now eight years later we may be seeing recovery. But yes of course, this is all nothing more than a continuation of the previous administration's policies. All hail the stimulus.
Chuck,
You sound like a true crony capitalist. Is James Taggart your alter ego?
@Rusty
"It's odd though. Trump gets elected and almost the next day the stock market takes a jump and the employment situation improves."
As Mian and Sufi pointed out in "The House of Debt", people who had a bulk of their wealth tied to stock and bond equities came out of the crisis unscathed relative to the people who had most of their wealth tied to housing (the middle, lower middle classes).
I'd be wary to use the performance of the stock market as a means to measure economic health.
It is true that about 40% of the country does not work for a living. You can't call them "employed", so they are "unemployed" in the truest sense of the word. Officially they are not "participating", but they are, they are just taking - not contributing, and that is the core problem with causing our debt, deficit, lack of vigor in a country that went to the moon over and over decades ago where nobody else has gone since.
The participation rate is not the problem though. It's not historically low now. It's been lower in good times. The difference is that those people were carried mostly by their families, and now they get a check from the government, who lets them do it guilt-free without asking anything in return, and that's exactly what we get.
@CWJ
" But yes of course, this is all nothing more than a continuation of the previous administration's policies. All hail the stimulus."
The EU chose the austerity route and look how well things turned out for them :-)
My obnoxious loud lefty coworker just said that if the economy tanks in the next three years then it will be the Republicans and President Trump's fault!?!
Clearly it was the gays getting married that turned around the economy from the recession. The correlation is glaring.
~
bagoh20
Made my work easy. No heavy lifting here.
“Trump didn't create those jobs ..
I thought Trump and King made millions promoting the Dempsey fight boostering the massive recovery in Goldfield.
we did
America Great.
but what he did is take clear steps
Clear on the proximate horizon. Medial and distal are still fuzzy.
I've doubled my investment in my company's future, opened a second location in Nevada,
Smells like Clark county. Maybe Washoe. Or you might own two partial gold mines in Tonopah.
That might be overly optimistic
That might be an overstatement.
How’s supply-side for skilled workers? All those Trump priority skilled immigrants gang-rushing to Nevada? In massive floodering hordes? The English-speaking ones? Has Nevada has stoppered non-English-speaking illegals from trimming the verge at Nevada golf courses?
Many commenters are actually still believing that the sudden flood of decisions to buy stocks, and the amazing decisions to build mega manufacturing in the USA, and the enumerable decisions to start up small business expansions here, are not due to faith in our President's promises.
Just call these DJT's luck. And all this has happened while Congress's GOP leadership have passed ZERO pro growth Legislation, all trying hard to snuff out Trump.
After 20 more pro Trump Senators are elected in 2018 the Governing Majority of Trump's support will go from 40 to 60 Senators. Then hide and watch.
"The EU chose the austerity route and look how well things turned out for them :-)"
At least they got nowhere without also spending nearly a trillion dollars annually. :-)
Some points -
As Cook says, way too early.
A better number is the workforce participation rate, which is very slightly up, in the same trajectory since 2010. Better yet is the total population employment rate for ages 16-54 (you will find this at the St. Louis Fed), which is on about the same trend.
Snark makes a good point, there has been a global recovery since 2008-2009. The interesting bit, on which I did a good amount of excel work earlier this year, is that the US has had the slowest employment recovery of all the advanced countries since 2008, or indeed since 2000.
Trump mentioned the rate at his ralley and immediately said the numbers are not including all those who have given up looking. Those who are no longer counted. He minimized the low rate to say more jobs are needed.
Kinda surprised me, to be honest. Better hurry and say the market is bound to go down before he gets blamed for it.
Nyamujal said...
The EU chose the austerity route and look how well things turned out for them :-)
This is a good point but it also points to why the US economy is continuing to grow, large parts of the EU, our largest trading partner, are finally getting out of recession. Spain for example, which was a complete basketcase for years, is finally doing quite well. This belated recovery is a strong boost to our own economy.
The idea that the 'masters of the universe' buy into Trump's BS and are thus running up the stock market is laughable at best and at worst a possible indicator of delirium.
As for the quality of jobs, the best metric probably is median income - your choice or taste as to household or personal.
The numbers here are lagged quite a bit though, it comes through the Census a year or more late.
Also, the CPI inflator applied is questionable.
buwaya said...
the US has had the slowest employment recovery of all the advanced countries since 2008, or indeed since 2000.
Like to see those numbers in comparison to Greece and Italy.
“ .. best metric probably is median income ..”
Methinks. Bloomberg has it that passive investing will ruin Trump’s great-again run.
8/4/17, 10:28 AM
Blogger Nyamujal said...
"I get how this works. When the economy does well under a Democrat it's in spite of his policies. When it does well under a Republican, it's because of his policies."
It isn't complicated. Higher taxes and more regulation and a general antipathy towards entrepreneurship that obama showed are going to hurt the economy.
The increased year-over-year debt under Obama was $1.3 trillion. That's trillion with a 'T'.
Anybody who thinks Europe went the austere route is misinformed, ignorant (willfully or otherwise) and/or grossly in error. If you check their balance sheets you will see precisely zero signs of austerity.
Even Greece, which cannot pay its bills, is still spending considerably more than it makes. College students taking non-dischargeable student loans while majoring in Underwater Basket Weaving Studies are similarly austere.
traditionalguy said...
...
After 20 more pro Trump Senators are elected in 2018 the Governing Majority of Trump's support will go from 40 to 60 Senators. Then hide and watch.
That is some hellacious trashtalk! 20 more "pro Trump" senators! Wow!
Which seats in Class I of the Senate are going to flip parties? Will Dean Heller be re-elected? Jeff Flake? Bob Corker? Deb Fischer?
"But is anyone going to seriously claim that these latest employment numbers should be credited to Trump?"
Me. Can anyone seriously claim that President Trump's actions on deregulation and promise of tax cuts hasn't increased business optimism?
Low interest rates, low inflation and a trillion dollar bailout/stimulus were only getting a 1+% growth rate. There is something wrong with that picture after 8 years. The near immediate response of the market and job growth are pretty clear as to the reason. If (meaning if the Dem's can't block it) the business tax rate is lowered to make us competitive I'd bet a growth rate of 3-4% is achievable over the short haul. It still leaves the larger structural problems of long term debt, automation (displacement) and globalization though. Cracking that nut is going to cause some pain. Trump has shown zero interest in attacking the larger problem these present, which is my main bitch.
Yep all this good economic news is just the carryover effect from "cash for clunkers". Thanks Obama!
Chuck, nobody gives a damn about the NPR story but you.
You're boring.
Aren't there still something like 90 million people that can work full-time, but aren't?
I'm going to say what must be said:
Yes there is more optimism for a better regulatory and tax environment.
But, the trend line has not yet moved appreciably.
The Fed has been moving interest rates higher which should increase normality in the market.
New presidents should not receive credit or blame for anything that happens until the new fiscal year starts. That means the last quarter of this year will be Trump's first to own, by all legitimate measures.
(Legitimate measures do not include political blame for things like 9-11 or Bill Clinton taking credit for a recovery that started months BEFORE the 1992 election and quarters before his inauguration.)
An interesting parallel is the Great Depression.
The US had the worst and slowest recovery, or nearly none at all (save for the political fallout). It came a distant second to France.
There are excellent arguments that the US had the worst public policy response to the crisis of the time, creating rather than removing structural barriers to recovery.
Its a very common opinion that the US has, similarly, had abnormal structural barriers since the 1990s, and worse ones from 2009.
exiledonmainstreet said...
Chuck, nobody gives a damn about the NPR story but you.
What was interesting to me was that Althouse thought it was interesting enough to do a blog post on it. In the first instance.
And that post drew 300+ comments.
And then, when I had solid information about how Milo was wrong, that NPR was blameless, and that the interview was actually aired as planned on WNPR-Connecticut, it became uninteresting and even "boring."
I don't get that. Still don't.
Scott M
Roughly 38% of the working age population is not working for various reasons:
1) mismatched skills
2) disabled (legitimate and otherwise)
3) child rearing
4) retraining and other education
Not all of those people would be in the work force today or tomorrow. Some never again or at all.
Chuck: "...But is anyone going to seriously claim that these latest employment numbers should be credited to Trump? After barely two quarters?"
How about we think of this as a rebound from 32 quarters when Obama was standing on our economic windpipe?
Feste
I can't speak for Nevada, but I'm having a difficult time finding skilled people.
Most of the people I am getting are older.
buwaya: "...An interesting parallel is the Great Depression. The US had the worst and slowest recovery, or nearly none at all (save for the political fallout). It came a distant second to France...."
From the quality of your comments here and elsewhere, I imagine you know far more about the Thirties and economics than I. But your remark made me think again of Amity Shlaes' excellent "The Forgotten Man," which argues (quite plausibly IMHO) for the gross incompetence and perfectly counter-cyclical interventions of FDR and his band of geniuses.
There is a point where you have to hold the tiller loosely and let the craft find her way.
Milton Friedman became god by honing his wares on the Great Depression. He was only 5'0", as a lifelong average, until Reagan puffed him, but I’m thinking that deficiencies in American macro-economic structural responses pre-date the 90's, going back to compromise remedies forged in the failures of the Articles of Confederation, but what do I know, graduate that I am, of Trump University, waiting for the roulette tables to pay.
Rusty said...
Bless you for that Rusty. Beats me. Keep looking? I dunno.
buwaya said...
An interesting parallel is the Great Depression.
The US had the worst and slowest recovery, or nearly none at all (save for the political fallout). It came a distant second to France.
There is no parallel to the Great Depression because the US did better after the Great Bush Recession than did most of its most comparable economic rivals.
Dr. Milton Friedman was named Nobel Laureate in 1976 for work he did in the 1950s. On his faculty at the University of Chicago were four other Nobel Laureates.
Feste, perhaps you should stick to unintelligible drivel.
$1.3 trillion dollars per year in year-over-year increases to the debt with more than $4 trillion of that debt held by the government because the bond market would not carry the bonds.
AReasonableMan thinks that his false claim that America did better since 2008 than America's "economic rivals" (a null set) and that lousy T-shirt is justification for doubling the debt.
General Honore is holding on Line 1.
The REAL unemployment rate (U6, I think) is still at 8.6%. Still plenty of people out there to attract to the labor force.
I credit Obama's 8 years of The Summer Of RECOVERY! That MUST be the reason.
Rusty.
NB - still no answers. Yesterday visited birthday boy, now 96 years young, my adopted grandpa, a super-Trump donor, WWII bomber rider, took him a large chocolate covered macaroon cookie, fresh bombing supply, and his eyes wide-open showed it.
My heart’s-a-telling me, there’s gotta be a way, lovingly to business-recycle our elders. Some kind of biological imperative (may be biblical, or Kantian imperative, for you, I dunno) a way to respect our elders, by not consigning them to waste heaps. Just a feeling - many are willing. No clue how you implement this on your end.
"And that post drew 300+ comments."
And how many of those comments were yours?
Birkel - "Feste, perhaps you should stick to unintelligible drivel."
Okay. I'll read all your posts.
My point wasn't where he taught. I know where. Nor when. It was - what - he studied to get where he got.
Since I tried for admission to Trump University, and saw only "introductory, intermediate, and advanced jackoffery" on Trump's curriculum, and since I prefer to do my own fucking, I kept my free-ride scholarship at the Rockefeller school where Milton taught.
"Super-duper kudos to you on restraining yourself. Gotta be tough, being you. What a provocation!"
Chuck, you regularly fall into slobbering ad hominemism due to Internet comments. Bring some to get some.
.. a non-parametric hint for Birkel.
The Great Depression According to Milton Friedman was exactly what? ...
a contraction of the real money supply
Now what?
not bad!
When you said Reagan "puffed up" Friedman you were wrong.
Just because you go out of your way to be indecipherable doesn't mean you get to make shit up.
There's that school - you know - the ______ ____ _______, who say, just print more. That's their observation. Not the prescription.
Jesus Birkel. It was a comment about his height at 5'0". And Reagan did puff him. Credit to Reagan. Shit ..
I would like to eat your Big Kahuna burger.
And drink your Sprite.
Birkel " ... indecipherable ..."
Yeah. I wrote: "Milton Friedman became god by honing his wares on the Great Depression."
That's really fucking indecipherable. Sorry.
"And drink your Sprite."
Heh. Marketing. Real sprites are animated via fight-picking mechanisms. Mine aren’t passive aggressive.
Since I’m still waiting for Nevadan answers to how the new flood of Trumpster legal immigration will flood those well-paying, English speaking, Nevada-tech jobs, the skilled job vacancies ... while illegals trim the verge on Nevada golf courses, and always will, ... where the real questions are ... I’ll enjoy the fled-to-silence-sprites ...
Birkel the Weasel Boy said...
I would like to eat your Big Kahuna burger.
And drink your Sprite.
That's only two felonies, Weasel Boy.
I only wish to drink Fernandinande's milkshake.
"Remarkably low-grade crappy fake news, courtesy of Milo, and re-broadcast courtesy of Drudge, Breitbart, Atlhouse and a hundred other mindless alt-right websites."
Forgetting your other examples, Chuckster, why would you be so ignorant as to label this blog as "mindless alt-right". Or was it a function of poor grammar, vis-Ã -vis, your mediocre public education?
Are we talking about the jobs report here?
One comment is that the UPI report is as negative as they could make it. They refer to all the components such as the U rate as "little changed", and don't characterize the jobs number at all. To report on the White House reaction, they use the MSM guidebook form, which is "smear, fact" in each sentence. Thus,
"President Donald Trump, who before his election accused former President Barack Obama of manipulating the Labor Department's statistics, sent a Twitter message Friday regarding the July statistics reading, 'Excellent Jobs Numbers just released -- and I have only just begun.'"
I justify my vote for Trump to my liberal friends, who parrot the "Trump is racist" line, by saying that I believe minorities will do better under Trump.
So I am looking at the BLS report. Over the last 12 months, white employment has risen only 700,000, and the employment/population ratio (the percentage of whites who are employed) has only risen from 60.6% to 60.8%.
"Black or African American" employment rose a little MORE than 700,000 over the last 12 months, despite the Black population being so much smaller. Black employment/population ratio rose from 56.4% to 58.0%, a much bigger increase.
I am using the non-seasonally adjusted numbers (year-over-year actual numbers provides a better seasonal adjustment, no estimation necessary). I'm encouraged so far.
But my liberal friends are horrified that Trump is deregulating
I liked Althouse's idea of deleting Chuck's comments from yesterday.
Blogger Chuck said...
What a disgrace that will be, for Milo, for Breitbart and, for what it's worth, Ann Althouse and her blog. Milo's story called out "NPR", used the NPR logo, and yet NPR was never involved in any editing, production or airing of the story.
So that's your standard, Chuck?
President Trump had nothing to do with Trump University other than lending his name. No input, control or other interaction. Even the National Progressives admit this.
So now you are saying no blame should attach to President Trump for the university?
Good to know.
John Henry
Blogger Rusty said...
I can't speak for Nevada, but I'm having a difficult time finding skilled people.
Most of the people I am getting are older.
Can you share more about this? What kind of people? Skilled? Semi-Skilled, unskilled? What kind of business?
Ignore me if I am too nosy. It is an issue that has been a concern to me and my clients for years now. I have thought for a number of years that the employment problem (finding good people) is much more serious to the US economic health than the unemployment problem. Which is also pretty serious.
Happy to chat offline if you want john@changeover.com
I'll be in Las Vegas the end of September if you'd like to meet up for a coffee or something. (Or anyone else)
John Henry
John said: "Ignore me if I am too nosy. It is an issue that has been a concern to me and my clients for years now. I have thought for a number of years that the employment problem (finding good people) is much more serious to the US economic health than the unemployment problem. Which is also pretty serious."
Why don't the enormous efficiencies that make it so easy to put people together for dating purposes, do something similar for employee/employer?
Paul J.
"President Trump had nothing to do with Trump University other than lending his name. No input, control or other interaction. Even the National Progressives admit this."
He owned more than 90% of the company and participated in at least one infomercial in which he claimed he "handpicked" the instructors (later denied in a deposition). That's a bit more than an arm's length licensing deal.
"Can you share more about this? What kind of people? Skilled? Semi-Skilled, unskilled? What kind of business?"
Skilled machinists, welders and electricians. men or women. We do a lot of stuff in stainless steel and Alum. Very little CNC work. The operators have to know how to set up and run a job with very little supervision.
I hired a young guy who is going to be looking at all our old machines and coming up with wiring schematics. He'll have job security for at least a year on that alone. Our welder is 63. He used to fabricate stainless feeder bowls. He can oxy/acet. alum. it's why we hired him.
I'm in St.Charles Illinois. But I'll have a drink to you anyway.
Snark said... "a bit more than an arm's length licensing deal."
Agree. And, I forget, just who named that failed university?
Blogger Rusty said...
He used to fabricate stainless feeder bowls.
You and I are probably the only 2 people here who know what that means. I sold feeder bowls for Service Engineering for 22 years.
I do a "Secrets of Vibratory Feeding" workshop (Let's see what Laslo does with that!) and am, sort of, working on a book of the same name.
For the curious http://changeover.com/vibratoryfeeders.html
For Paul, I think, who asked about a dating app: There are plenty of those out there like Ladders.com . The problem is that the people who Rusty and my clients are looking for don't exist. There is no shop in HS any more to get kids interested in this kind of stuff. Few apprenticeships. Everyone is pushed towards college, never toward welding, or machining or other trades.
You can't match up existent jobs with non-existent people.
One of the things that really thrills me about President Trump is his recent ExO that will reduce restrictions on apprenticeships and technical training.
John Henry
"Why don't the enormous efficiencies that make it so easy to put people together for dating purposes, do something similar for employee/employer?"
Because we subsidize four year degrees in fuck duck diversity studies and killed all of the vocational education opportunities.
It was a conscious choice made by the people who run the education system in our country. Instead of training employable welders we train unemployable protesters.
Been busy, but found my old spreadsheet re relative performance on total population employment rates age 16-54 data from St. Louis Fed sources were I believe from the OECD.
Germany Canada Australia USA UK France Japan
Q1 2000 - 65.3 69.23 68.12 73.69 70.8 61.7 67.98
Q1 2003 - 64.9 70.7 69.89 70.87 71.3 64 67.63
Q1 2007 - 69.5 74.57 72.94 72.01 71.6 65 71.1
Q1 2010 - 70.4 69.9 71.82 66.05 68.9 63.6 70.08
Q1 2016 - 74.2 71.13 72.32 68.82 73.1 63.7 73.63
I.e., The US was at the top of the heap in terms of employment at the end of the 1990's - more Americans of prime working age were actually employed than in any other advanced economy.
The recession of 2000-2001 knocked the US down into the upper ranks of the top economies. The US NEARLY recovered, but the others were advancing also.
The recession of 2008-2009 knocked the US below the upper ranks - i.e., it was worse in the US than in the upper ranks.
The US recovery was worse, so now the US is still substantially below the upper ranked economies in terms of actual employment. Based on what once was, the US still has a long way to go to get to where other advanced economies are, and where the US once was.
And yeah, go stick that in a spreadsheet.
I have this for every quarter, makes a very interesting chart, which I wish I could post.
I could do Italy or anywhere else the OECD has data for, but it may take a while.
If you want to explain Trump, the sole metric,
Its that fall from 72% to 66%, plus the fact that even eight years later the economy has made up only half of that decline.
That's a huge deal. That is far more important than any other subject or category in US public policy.
The press doesn't care, they never reported this in any meaningful way, and they still aren't.
For 7 years of I got .5% yearly raises, with company barely making it. And I was glad to have work at all. Then, in December, when it became clear that the company is roaring back, we got 4-6% raises, AND THEN hefty bonuses in March. I finally got the nerve to sell my condo and buy a house, which is really just absolutely thrilling. And it's not only me - the 50 or so people I work with are also feeling...buoyant. Even the ones who think they hate Trump. If this holds, and I'm right about people's moods, I think Dems are going to have a lot more difficulty than they might imagine.
Now let's start seeing the long-term unemployed start coming back into the workforce. That would really be something.
You'd think. But no, we'll keep pulling in immigrants to make sure nobody gets a raise.
I'm pretty sure it's all bubble fumes, slackening due to unsustainable EOs, or a continuation of the previous administration's progress. But either way I'm sure the current WH appreciates your free shilling on their behalf!
"I'm pretty sure it's all bubble fumes, slackening due to unsustainable EOs, or a continuation of the previous administration's progress"
You really should do your own research, extract the data yourself and come to your own conclusions. Its not difficult.
The actual progress of the "recovery" is a painfully gradual line following a rapid collapse.
The usual sort of a recovery from a recession is a rapid climb following a collapse. The fact that other economies avoided such a deep collapse, and managed such rapid recoveries, indicates US structural problems. These date back to the 200-2001 recession also, as the recovery from that was also rather slow and incomplete - see data above.
My own suspicion is the US economy has been hobbled since the 1990's bubble, by accumulating systemic inefficiencies. These are the fault not just of the politicians of both parties, but also of the non-political institutions, for instance the accumulating complication of the legal environment, to such an extent that even more overtly socialist countries are now more dynamic.
Wherein buduwaya avoids at all costs actually admitting that it's America's outsourcing of all infrastructure as a voluntary exercise to private industry (as well as most healthcare and nearly all childcare) that makes the American economy more sluggish than it needs to be.
buwaya said...
Thanks for the digging.
68.82 Q1 2016 - U.S.
Did I select this from the correct cell?
“Trump, the sole metric .. it’s that fall from 72% to 66%, plus the fact that even eight years later the economy has made up only half of that decline.”
What’s happening between 68.82 Q1 to 72%? - when?
Not adversarial questions. And thanks again for digging.
So, we’re in a scree field at 75 degrees (or whatever)? - and not a slippery slope? - not Lemmings over the cliff? Yet? Bubble fumes, in re. stocks, right? Not fumes for “total population employment”? Do you read this gradualism as approximating an equilibrium? To be punctuated?
... aye, buwaya, sorry, the fumes are not your own!
Ritmo,
I mentioned a very broad category of structural factors.
A poor position in terms of trade certainly could be one of these, wherin foreign manufactures drive away local ones (I assume that's what you mean by exporting infrastructure, if not please clarify), and there are in fact several good studies that make this point, especially WRT to the China.
These influential papers (there are a series) are very often cited - Pierce, Schott, Bayard et. al.
http://faculty.som.yale.edu/peterschott/files/research/papers/pierce_schott_pntr_512.pdf
"This paper finds a relationship between the sharp decline in U.S. manufacturing employment
after 2000 and the United States' conferral of permanent normal trade relations on China, a policy that is notable for eliminating the possibility of future tariff
increases and the uncertainty with which they were associated rather than reducing
the tariffs actually applied to Chinese goods."
"could certainly be"
Well that's a very flexible caveat.
American industry "could certainly" afford to make less crap. But that wouldn't be fun. We have an auto industry that can't really figure out how to market to anyone but Americans and a few Chinese here or there.
Trump's trade wars will be of minor value and hurt almost as much as they will help. He could go for worker protections but that defeats his love of the sort of slave labor that he would prefer to have us compete against China for. And his companies manufacture a hell of a lot of goods in China!
Just like how he exempted his own hospitality industry companies from having to hire Americans instead of immigrants. He's a phony and all in it for himself. Amazing you can't allow yourself to see that.
Feste,
The US sequence goes like this -
Top of the heap -
Q1 2000 - 73.69
200-2001 recession, the bottom (total employment is a lagging metric)
Q1 2003 - 70.87
Top of the recovery
Q1 2007 - 72.01
Collapse, depths of the last recession -
Q1 2010 - 66.05
A point on the long slow recovery -
Q1 2016 - 68.82
So the US lost about 6% 2007-2010, and made back less than 3% by 2016
The current OECD stat for the US is only for Q4 2016, and that is up to 69.5%
So it will probably be a bit more for the part of the series I show here, for Q1
So the US is still down @ 2.5% vs 2007, and 4.2% vs 2000
buwaya,
Scratch the question. Think I got it. You probably meant the 72% is Q1 2007. Not some weird anomaly, not apparent here, at the start of Trump’s term.
yes, we posted just about the same time, see my blurb, above .. think I got it! thanks ...
"Well that's a very flexible caveat. "
It has to be. This is a very complex thing you know. Nothing this complex is all this or all that, and even a whole mess of factors are likely to interact with each other. Makes troubleshooting hell.
"Trump's trade wars will be of minor value and hurt almost as much as they will help. "
Impossible to tell. See Pierce, Schott et. al. You can argue this in many ways.
"He could go for worker protections"
What do you mean by this? If it is a firing freeze the most likely effect is to lock in a low employment rate, i.e., create a hiring freeze. Why hire?
"And his companies manufacture a hell of a lot of goods in China!"
Afaik his business doesn't market "goods" much. He is a rentier above all.
For the rest, you are not attempting to understand the broad reach of your problems, a serious defect of American politics. Not anywhere near enough science in the people, and far too many emotional appeals like yours.
I always tell new engineers to take their emotions outside and shoot them. They cannot troubleshoot or hear criticism if they are feeling and not thinking.
To clarify, my data series was actually direct from the OECD -
Go mess around here and you should be able to download the series for any country
https://data.oecd.org/emp/employment-rate.htm
BTW, they DO have Q1 and Q2 for the US, and good news, for Q2 its up to 70.0
Reading, "The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment"
.. damn, buwaya, I expected this to be an easy answer to simple Pareto optimals ..
I always tell new engineers to take their emotions outside and shoot them.
Hence, engineers are usually about as good at solving social problems as your typical ant farmer.
".. damn, buwaya, I expected this to be an easy answer to simple Pareto optimals .."
Yes, I struggle too. Not my field really.
... must I really go all the way back to the Smoot-Hawley Tariif Act of 1930? ... well, why not ...
"Hence, engineers are usually about as good at solving social problems as your typical ant farmer."
The secret here is to understand that social problems are never actually solved by anyone.
They can be described, and that is best done by an engineer, or someone with an engineering sort of mind. That's plain troubleshooting.
The real problem is figuring out a fix, which for any problem requires testing and trial and error. People don't like that. They don't actually want their problems fixed, if it comes down to it. So no, engineers aren't good at that part.
Social problems are generally fixed, if at all, by unconscious process of an implied social consensus. That or mass murder, history is not a comfortable guide here.
"... must I really go all the way back to the Smoot-Hawley Tariif Act of 1930? ... well, why not .."
There is nothing new under the sun...
Note also the restriction in the analysis. This thing is, maybe, possibly, just part of your problem.
The secret here is to understand that social problems are never actually solved by anyone.
Right. Problems that were never solved like widespread illiteracy, poverty, poor social mobility, or recourse to the law, etc. Such a big secret. If only those mechanics were around to tell everyone what a lost cause the Enlightenment was. The only problems that exist are how machines run. The rest are too secretive to resolve. So secretive that we shouldn't even believe they can be solved - no matter how many times they have been.
You just like to argue. Open your steel-trapped mind for a second and stop drinking the anti-social Kool-Aid.
Yes see, "In constructing this index .. searched the database Proquest for articles that contain the words "China," "uncertain,"or "uncertainty," and "most favored nation," or "normal trade relations," for the years 1989 to 2013."
One problem with the creation of this particular index involves uncertainty measures as false positives, false negatives, and how-many-distributed silences neglecting the terms, that is, I’m assuming we wouldn’t have gotten into normal trade relations with a non-market economy if all the hidden variables in these uncertainties existed in some quantum realm, that is, where all variables are expressed, and are not hidden ... unless it was one massive crap shoot for that huge market potential ..
Blogger The Toothless Revolutionary said...
I always tell new engineers to take their emotions outside and shoot them.
"Hence, engineers are usually about as good at solving social problems as your typical ant farmer."
Yes if ants provide solutions that create jobs and foster new indutries. Social scientists are notoriously bad at those things.
What person, what institution, or what policy "solved" illiteracy? Anywhere?
This is a rather hotly debated question.
In all cases you will find that literacy was rising as the population decided they wanted to achieve literacy. They were teaching themselves; at some point it became a consensus to, say, provide public education by some means, to institutionalize the process.
The reason for that has become obvious in our time, as the true problem of education is not in providing an opportunity to learn, but providing a desire to learn - the old proverb of "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink".
My favorite comparative case - and this was cited in ADB papers, at least, going back 40 years - was South Korea. SK started "economic takeoff" with a very high proportion of illiterates (a majority in 1955 IIRC). The SK population embraced education because they needed it, not because it was pushed on them. Now, of course, it is.
... okey dokey ... losing it right here, until I get “the eight-digit Harmonized System (HS) level, also referred to as "tariff-lines” ... will work at this one ...
Feste,
Now you have a new hobby. You are welcome.
Whatever you say, buwaya.
I've long ago learned that you will just make up whatever you want to say as long as it makes you contrarian enough to think of yourself as dutiful, or whatever.
buwaya ... “now you have a new hobby. You are welcome.”
Heh. See, I have a theory.
John Nash did not need meds or shock treatments, just ordinary R&R from the PTSD incurred by the limits of conductance maths that govern our neural transmissions, which, when conductance goes massively parallel in Nash’s brain (not little-mine, thank God), neural transmissions approach or simulate resonance functions, and then, you know what happens when resonance is on the rise, or fall, and what small errors can do under high pressures ... now, back to reading ...
... baseline speci cation assumes a linear relationship ... yeah, well, okay, no resonance breakdowns yet ..
Buwaya, question. Loving the parameters here. Including, “The United States versus the EU.” And will keep reading.
Question: when Trump cried foul about Chinese currency manipulation, which is not all this tariff and non-market renormalization stuff, as in this paper, then did Trump pull that argument out of the same dark place where attorneys get emotional damages? - or was Trump in private face-time iPhone sessions, doing 40-page linear equations, with Soros? - or what?
Will check back ...
Ah, Ritmo, that is because you need depth.
Let us consider education (a lifelong interest on mine), in the other matter engineers are good at, R&D. There are a great number of social problems solved by technology - and many others created by technology of course, but genies don't like going back into bottles.
Anyway, engineers created everything of any value, albeit they may not have been called engineers. They did however empirically create technology. Scientists? Bah. Engineers.
And technology does not simply mean mechanisms and ironmongery. Human behaviors can be inventions too. This is very common. A technique can involve ways of teaching whole crowds to behave in a certain way for a unified purpose. Linear tactics of the 17th-18th century battlefield for instance, the Spanish Tercio, the Swiss pike phalanx. And the elementary classroom, also an invention of the 17th century, which made universal literacy cheap and feasible.
Behold the man - Jean Baptiste De La Salle. He had a goal, to make the mass of he poor literate (or all the boys anyway), in order to reinforce their faith. (I am a La Salle boy, I know this stuff).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_de_La_Salle
So he tested. He tried. He was empirical, this worked better than that and so on, R&D.
He developed highly specific procedures whereby one man could effectively teach 50 boys at once to read and write and do arithmetic and understand their faith. Or understand it somewhat better anyway. He wrote the manuals on how to do it, and how to teach others to do it, very handy that. Everyone on earth copied him.
You can read his manuals today - This is the big one - "The Conduct of the Christian Schools"
https://lasallian.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Conduct-2007-reprint.pdf
Everything there is, in engineering terms, "best practices" - tested procedures adopted as part of a system. This is technology.
" when Trump cried foul about Chinese currency manipulation, which is not all this tariff and non-market renormalization stuff"
No idea. Sometimes leaders grab stuff out of their ass and hand it to the experts to figure out what they mean. Guys like me. It came out of his ass as "currency", but it may get turned into "tarriffs' - the main role of a leader is to say that something is a problem, and to kick butt to fix it. How it is to be done is flexible.
I once suggested in a faculty meeting that the greatest educational institution in history was the US Army in WWII which taught 200,000 men to fly.
Needless to say there were snorts of disbelief from the feminist members.
Jean-Baptiste de La Salle is okay.
I’m more of an in-the-field of native operations - Bartolomé de las Casas - kinda guy myself.
Almost done ...
Michael K said..
“I once suggested in a faculty meeting that the greatest educational institution in history was the US Army in WWII which taught 200,000 men to fly.”
Not far off there Doc. I’ll take General Mattis. Old Third Marine. Studiously-a-lover, warrior monk, stable, cool. Motto: friends first, enemies only if that fails. Required cultural theater-training for those under his command. I think he is the real deal. Can’t get much better than that.
I have a dear adopted grandpa - 96 years old yesterday - flyboy WWII bomber, Extreme Trump supporter. Gave gob-wads of money. Took him a macaroon chocolate dipped cookie for his birthday - bombing supplies. He and I go around and around about Trump (I’m no lefty). I grant him this. He’s an extraordinary gentleman. Still lucid. We agree on swamp draining. And on Twelve O’Clock High. How to drain the swamp is where we fight - a problem.
buwaya
Housekeeping: see my comment in “At the Me and My Angel Café” regarding my catholic [sic] affections. Don’t fault me if I’m more catholic than you [swipe]!
Now, down to it. This article - “The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment” - is what you promised. Appropriately complex. You got another thing correct: I will need to study it, as you said, as a new hobby.
Lifetime, I’d say.
Next: you pull out this engineering stuff now!
Blurring the lines between Business schools (always engineering) and Econ schools. That’s a firefight I want none of! Thing is, in engineering, a linear increase in working parts results in an exponential increase complexity.
I know how you guys are.
Had an argument (little closer to home) on natural engineering: whether high conductance along the length of DNA amounted to a feature or an artifact? All those stacked PI orbitals might help hold the thing together, protect structural integrity a little, but conductivity otherwise is a functionless artifact. Of engineering!
Leastways, they haven’t found superconductivity along the strands yet.
But then again, just let the engineers take over ...
buwaya, all
Worthwhile exchanges, all. Thanks.
Peace, outawhile ...
"Like to see those numbers in comparison to Greece and Italy."
The statistics were about advanced countries. ; )
" And on Twelve O’Clock High."
That is actually nonfiction. The guy who was portrayed as Frank Savage was actually a guy named Frank Armstrong and the group they called "the 918th" was the 306th bomb group. They tripled the number. Ley was in the group during the war.
Another interesting thing was that Armstrong, when he took over the group and went on the first mission into Germany, went as co-pilot and the pilot was a guy named Paul Tibbets, who was the most experienced B17 pilot and was put in charge of a new group of B 29s that had the mission to drop the atomic bomb.
I've got to give you credit. I've never heard a dumb, useless blatherer with no point go on and demand that he somehow had something I was supposed to learn from him as much as you've done, buwaya. It must have something to do with your authoritarian culture. The one that breeds democide and tyranny but almost no useful creativity.
How many millions of your own people do you regularly kill in your own part of the world?
Too bad we couldn't have just given you retards over to the Japanese. And after you so willingly swallowed colonization by our third-rate competitor in the exploration enterprise, Spain!
Go continue being a tool for as long as you like. I realize you don't have the confidence to let your actions speak louder than your completely idiotic words. You are as narrow as they come. An AI-bot could produce more interesting conversation than you can. One probably designed by the Japanese.
Begone with your aggravating, arrogant idiocy. Enjoy your country's $7.8k annual PPP GDP.
And give my regards to your overlords, the Marcoses.
"That is actually nonfiction"
Yes. Awesome on so many levels.
Didn't know the Paul Tibbets story arc. New one to me. Thanks.
Ah, Ritmo, I am actually one of those fellows with tradition in "the exploration enterprise", a conquistador by heritage.
We lot, most of us, are still loyal subjects of the Spanish crown. I am a Spaniard with a brown EU passport.
In fact an ancestor was the last man ever given a conquistadors charter by a Spanish governor. And for that matter, that business was more on the up and up than what Cortez got up to. Besides a whole lot of other fellows in pith helmets in the family tree. Pith helmets run in the family. We have form, as the British say.
The Philippines is, to us, as the Spanish saw her in the 19th century, a lovely but estranged daughter of her Spanish mother, who unfortunately took up with an American ruffian, got raped by a Jap, and has struggled with adulthood ever since. Its complicated.
Blogger Feste said...
Reading, "The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment"
Surprisingly swift?
Look at this graph. It has been declining in a pretty smooth, straight, line since 1947. It is not declining any more rapidly, or slowly, in recent years.
John Henry
Blogger Michael K said...
I once suggested in a faculty meeting that the greatest educational institution in history was the US Army in WWII which taught 200,000 men to fly.
Navy too. I was on a ship, with 200 other close friends, and the oldest person on the ship was probably under 40. Damn few over 30. Skipper and exec might have been 50.
There was a guy in my division we called "Pops" because he was an old guy. Maybe 30.
None with a lot of education. Most had high school and a few had a few semesters of college.
But the Navy trained all of us to do a job. Some in Navy tech schools as well as OJT. Also had systems in place to assure that we all knew exactly what to do about 90% of the time. That other 105 something really scary was happening.
And we sailed that ship around the world with no day to day adult supervision.
I did not appreciate it when I was in the Navy. I sure do appreciate it now.
Tibbetts is an interesting guy but you know who is even more interesting? Curtis Lemay. He appears a lot in McMaster's Dereliction of Duty and I realized I didn't know much about him. Took a break from McMaster to read LeMay's story of the B-29. He was in charge of its develoment and use. Then I read Tillmans Bio of Lemay.
Both books really opened my eyes. He was one hell of an airman, technically proficient in pilotage, navigation, bombing, gunnery logistics and more.
John Henry
Forgot the link: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rqBqAjRKBYg/VwfLa0Y5uaI/AAAAAAAAK08/Nuve0SRC9CUfpovuqzw84pjkmXvbtoBQg/s640/Ratio%2Bof%2BManufacturing%2BEmployment%2Bto.png
Also, to be clearer, the graph does not show a steady decline in absolute manufacturing employment. It is the percentage of manufacturing jobs vs all non agricultural jobs that has declined consistently since WWII.
I suspect that a graph of the percentage of agricultural jobs vs all jobs between, say, 1920 and today, would have a similar shape, though I've not actually gone to look since I don't see that it means much. What is meaningful is how much food (and manufactured goods) is produced, not hopw many people it took to do it.
Manufacturing, in constant dollars, per capita of total population, is way up. Pretty consistently and pretty much every year.
I don't have the numbers to hand but I think it was around $1,000 manufacturing output per capita in 1970 and $6,000 in 2014. Somewhere around there. Ask me tomorrow and I'll give you the actual figures.
John Henry
One more tidbit about Lemay: He was an avid hot rod builder and active in the base car club at the SAC command. He built himself a jet powered car in the 50's. That alone made me love him.
The bio doesn't have any detail other than to leave the impression that it was not a particularly safe car to be near when he lit off the engine.
John Henry
ttr said...
Begone with your aggravating, arrogant idiocy. Enjoy your country's $7.8k annual PPP GDP.
Any intelligent person would see the value of buwaya's posts. Not just the individual historical examples but the way to categorize and shape movements in society.
The problem you have is you don't believe in people, you believe in aristocracy/bureaucracy.
Any intelligent person would see the value of buwaya's posts.
He babbles and blathers and condescends and muddles and has zero respect for or understanding of Western values. A bit like you, but in a less violent and much more openly anti-Western way.
Not just the individual historical examples but the way to categorize and shape movements in society.
Not sure what this means, but he does seem to think he's good at putting people into dehumanizing categories and treating them like the material objects that narrow engineers are trained to see everything as.
The problem you have is you don't believe in people, you believe in aristocracy/bureaucracy.
So says the conspiracy-peddling/believing fool who hates seeing the law applied to Trump-person he worships and puts all his faith in violence, lies and demagoguery instead.
Next up: people begin re-entering the workforce.
Unemployment therefore rises as more jobs are created and filled.
Heads explode.
There are a number of commenters I enjoy reading. The comments about LeMay are an example.
The lefty trolls are active later in the day but I wonder why they never come up with anything interesting.
One was complaining about not having useful exchanges, as if he/she had posted anything but DNC trash.
Anyway, I am just taking a break from reading about the first day at Gettysburg, I've only been there once. It's too bad to live so far and still read a lot about it. I've been to Antietam, as well. Those places should be visited more frequently and the reading done between visits.
Michael K - I went to Gettysburg College, and was a Park Ranger there years back. If you ever get out east, let me know. I'm still local, and have given tours for years. My next door neighbor is a Licensed Battlefield Guide, and we have some great discussions. I actually have a copy of Col. Shields' original notebook for guides. Who are you reading re: First Day?
John said... "Feste said...Reading, "The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment"
John - “Surprisingly swift?”
Fair enough. Certainly not as swift as LeMay on a low-flight-path fire strike, eh?
The graph to which you refer (if we’re reading the same graph) has arguably been declining almost straight line since 1947 since we cannot always be fighting wars. Despite the fact that oftentimes we must.
When buwaya gave me the old croc roll down to the bottom of the pond to make me meet my death by reading "The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment", then I didn’t know in advance that I’d have to suck for air all the way back to the Smoot-Hawley Tariif Act of 1930. No less 1947
It was the “the eight-digit Harmonized System (HS) level, also referred to as 'tariff-lines'” that’s new to me. A post 1947 measure.
Trying to make sense out of an irreducibly complex helluva-mess. I’m not up to it. But, still in Nash’s game. Lower level cerebral life form that I am.
TTR,
" he's good at putting people into dehumanizing categories and treating them like the material objects "
I'm really sorry to tell you that this is you not him. I can't believe the way you talk to Buwaya. Why don't you just call him a n***** and be done with it?
He comes at you with facts, sense and experience all the time and you come back to him at him with vapors and abuse that are a) content free and b) I certainly wouldn't enjoy if was directed at me.
And he takes it. I guess that's that meek devout Christian thing. But I'm very glad that he stays above it because I'd much rather partake of his wisdom than of his temper. Yours too. If you could argue more like him you'd be a damn sight more impressive and effective in promoting your beliefs.
I think we're probably close to the same age so let me ask you this, haven't you had enough experience with people not listening to your advice, that you've learned to have a little calmness about it?
No I'm not in charge of you or the blog. (If I were, obviously like all sensible people my first act would be to put Chuck on a perpetual dual Sybian, size XXXL, set to puree. Feeding and O2 NG tubes, I'm not a monster.) It's just my opinion.
I defend Buwaya as I defend you. If I saw that Chuck was getting something that he didn't deserve, I might even defend him, as long as there was enough booze handy to wash the taste out of my mouth. Yuck, that's what comes of having too much imagination.
Lol do I want to tell anyone else how to blog today? Feste? Shrug, I guess he's one of those who writes just to please himself. More power to you. My props to your Bombardier Gpa.
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