How am I supposed to consolidate my power if the market doesn't crash so I can purchase residential and commercial real estate at bargain prices? Every third restaurant and business on Las Olas was shuttered in 2009, the buildings sold for next to nothing. Today there's one after another—Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bentley, Maserati—parked on the street in front of those same buildings, all the while, Steve B. and I enjoy that Luigi's coal fired pizza! /s
I'll see if I can dig it up, but I remember reading that on average, under democratic presidencies going back to FDR, the economy in general performs better than it does under a republican presidency. If I'm remembering right, it's not as simple as mere ideological differences because there has been changes within the parties in those intervening ~75 years but the trend still holds.
There are many marginally employable swing voters who vote Republican when they have jobs and the Democrats in charge ask for taxes, then vote Democratic when they get put out of work and need a social safety net.
GOP is the fun dad party and Dems are the mommy party.
Republicans run economy hot until it blows, then Dems get voted in to clean up. People get annoyed about taxes and regulation when economy is ok again, fun dad promises ice cream and pizza for dinner forever.. rinse & repeat.
Carter has good employment, but terrible inflation making everyone poor in miserable. His Fed appointee, Paul Volcker raises interest rates, kills inflation, puts the country in recession, and drives unemployment up during Reagan's first years in office. Carter's job numbers look better than they should, and Reagan's worse, unless you look at the bigger picture.
Reagan supported those interest rate changes. Reagan than continued to push deficit spending well after the recovery from those first couple years, a huge lasting trend in Republican administrations ever since.
It's also very hard to assume that Reagan being elected in 76 would've avoided the oil-driven inflation at the end of that decade.
But of course, we've decided as a country/media to generally blame Biden for non-policy factors that put the economy on a wild bullwhip ride from 2020-to-2023ish, soooooo... maybe Reagan can deal with getting the blame for the inflation too!
I don't think presidents have all that much to do with the economy (vs. the legislature). Well... maybe the most recent example is to the contrary with certain actions that historically should have been the role of Congress.
Sort of. I've done a lot of thinking about this one, and realize that it's really not just "one person" but a very large team of individuals, along with the "politics" of everything. If the President brings on a good staff, makes solid cabinet appointments, and they themself being a singular large part of the legislative process in modern years--given that it's usually fairly difficult to get 2/3rds of Congress to agree on anything--you can see the President actually has significantly more influence than you'd think.
In addition, it's the circles that person runs in and the circles that person's people run in. Do you think judge or cabinet appointments are decided on by one person? Sure, the President is a figurehead in this position and ultimately has to say yes or no, but there's a large pool of candidates out there and it's up to the staffers, maybe friends, maybe people in the know to propose those people to the President.
So while on paper the President doesn't, or shouldn't have that much power--in actuality with our current political process it's certainly much more.
Now, that said, just like the billionaires--they can only control so much. At least in the United States, there are competing interests even among the wealthy class, and sometimes shit just sort of happens--like a meteor killing the dinosaurs....or the release of decades of e-mails, videos, documents, and communications surrounding their pedophile behavior on a secret island in the Caribbean.
It seems silly to blame these on the president though, consider just the past two recessions and how little they had to do with the actions of POTUS...
And the president has enormous influence over what congress does (veto).
Of course everything is nuanced; the trend is merely interesting especially juxtaposed against people consistently voting for republicans for "economic" reasons.
That’s unless you have a Congress that lets the President usurp the pose of the purse that should be theirs and Supreme Court that rubber stamps everything he does
I'm not so sure either have much impact. Economic policy doesn't change much between administrations and Congress has been ineffective for a long time. Politics is mostly culture war things these days.
The Fed seems to be the big driver of the economy. Other than that, the government is moving things at the margins. Even Trumps tariff shenanigans don't seem to have rocked the boat much.
CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol.
JOLTS is where stress shows first. Openings fall,[1] hiring slows,[2] quits drop,[3] and layoffs rise later.[4] Biden in particular shows the weakness of your provided stats.
>CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol.
Can you explain why? Given that it's presumably averaged over the president's entire term, doesn't that provide a good measure of how much jobs were added under a given administration?
That seems like sarcasm because it is an overused excuse that republicans give for the bad usa economies under republican presidents.
I never once heard a reasonable explanation why policies only start to have an effect at the end of a year that is divisible by 4 or 8. It makes no sense if you think it through.
>S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color.
Democratic administrations also engage in and promote discriminatory hiring policies which flagrantly violate the civil rights act (Title VII specifically).
Based on that link, I don’t think I want the jobs that were created.
It would also pay to keep in mind that the link claims that the preceding layoffs hit the same group. Ie, they were the ones there to be hired after losing their jobs.
It also says that people of colour are underrepresented in the job market (in the companies measured in your link) when compared to their overall makeup of the population.
Correcting that would take some years of imbalance in hiring.
There has to be some lag, and it is more about who controls Congress.
For example, the housing crisis and bubble were largely driven by legislation passed years earlier, including the 1999 repeal of Glass Steagall under Clinton. That was passed by a Republican controlled Congress, and the crisis eventually exploded under Bush. So I do not think either Clinton or Bush can be directly blamed for the housing crash. It is the repeal of the glass steagall act.
And was the dot com bubble crash in early 2000s caused by Clinton or by Bush? Or some legalization passed a long time ago? Or it just a business cycle?
More broadly, I would argue that presidents, and even legislators, have limited control over the actual health of the economy. Are we going to say Trump is responsible for the AI boom? And if this AI boom collapses into a massive bubble burst under the next administration, will that president be blamed instead?
Yea, you can create programs that create jobs, by spending taxes. So this should be zero surprise.
The question you should /really/ be asking, since taxes are involved, is, was that hiring actually effective? Did we create jobs that actually provided lasting value to the world? Or did we just juice the numbers for the polls?
I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term. That spending is the jobs. If you tighten spending to cut waste or rebalance the books, growth slows and jobs shrink, but that’s kind of the tradeoff when you’re trying to fix long-term issues.
Over the last few decades, neither party has really cared about deficits anyway. Everyone’s been spending, just at different speeds. The real question isn’t “who creates more jobs,” it’s whether the spending is efficient, sustainable, and actually creates long-term value. Eventually the bills come due, interest costs rise, and priorities shift from growth to just keeping the lights on.
So yeah, Democrats tend to show stronger job numbers, but spending more will almost always do that. Whether it’s good spending is a separate debate. Budget discipline isn’t partisan, it’s just basic economics.
> I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term.
Thats not necessarily true. During Bill Clinton's presidency he cut the deficits and the debt and yet the economy saw very strong job growth.
Nothing happened in 2020 to affect this chart I'm sure. I would expect nothing less from the publication that falsely claimed Russians hacked into the US energy grid before an election.
Tariffs are bad for the economy. Foreign countries are ditching US partnerships, contracts. Less travelers are coming to US. Wow I wonder when will we open our eye. In the middle of all these, US is ditching its allies and planning to invade sovereign countries (Greenland).
Tariffs, forcing capital into 7 very large companies instead of small startups, wage suppression through weird offshoring and immigration schemes so on and so forth. There are seemingly unending number of issues that all contribute to the same outcome we're seeing today.
It seems strange not to mention ICE or even treatment of transgender individuals if you mention travelers. We've effectively taken out round-the-clock advertisements saying "If you're not a fire-breathing, straight WASP, tread lightly". Normally, out of a sense of egalitarianism for even conservatives, I would tag on "even though it's not true", but I fear the evidence simply doesn't bear this out anymore.
We're searching the phones of visiting punk kids. We're cruelly punishing Canadian residents for clerical errors by unnecessarily detaining them. We've told our own citizens that it's reasonable to interrogate them at any moment for looking brown or black. We told an entire class of people they simply do not exist as they or even their family, friends, and coworkers understand them. Finally, we're deporting people who, although they've been here unlawfully for years, have also contributed a great deal. I've left out the most egregious examples to remain focused on the system.
All of this is happening as a backdrop while droves of US-born and immigrant citizens alike lose their jobs and are unable to find new ones. To say the irony is palpable is an understatement.
would you care to clarify on this? are you saying the current administration has been corrupted by foreign adverseries? or has the administration been outsmarted by foreign adverseries?
The Heritage Foundation, billionaires and a lot of other people who want this are all US citizens, and they planned for this for a long time. Let's not blame others for something entirely US-homegrown.
As an ex East German, I wonder how much of it is the disappearance of the competing model. Some of the old communists actually warned about this. Don't get me wrong, I participated in the demonstrations back then, socialism had clearly failed as a society and economically. Does not make that particular idea wrong though. The powerful want to go back, take back the power they think is theirs, consciously or as a reflex.
Note that Europe, Germany in particular, are far from the "socialist" examples some, or many, Americans think, welfare state and all that. Fact is, when it comes to rigid stratification of society, who rules, who owns, Germany is far on the side of capital, and according to a study the few thousand people at the very top are from the same 4% of the population almost exclusively.
What is happening in the US is happening in more places. Here in Germany we too now have more and more attacks on social systems. It's never the fault of inept leadership, no the people must work more and longer! They have zero new ideas. That is the only one they can think of. I am not really exaggerating, even the representatives of our powerful "Mittelstand" (much of Germany's industry) heavily criticized especially the conservative CDU in the government only a few days ago, publicly.
I see no reason to try to blame the Chinese, or the Russians, or anyone. All of it comes from within, and not just in the US.
Post WW2 was a time of labor scarcity the US benefited from - but eventually that went away with global competition. The tech boom years were another labor scarcity time, and that’s also going away.
Both these times were plausible ways of entering the middle class.
What does economic theory say should happen to labor when scarcity ends but capital is strong? Does the economy expand until there’s more labor demand? Or will structural and monopolistic problems cause capital to benefit while suppressing wages - making us all serfs?
Any system based on exponential growth will have almost all people become serfs as even if their capital grows it falls behind the growth of older capital
"War begins to be presented as the heroic alternative, the last hope, the “way out” from the unending nightmare of economic crisis, misery and unemployment. Fascism, the most complete expression of modern capitalism, glorifies war. The filthy sophism “War means Work” begins to be circulated by the poison agencies of imperialism, and filters down to the masses.
...
War is only the continuation and working out of the crisis of capitalism and of the present policies of capitalism. It is inseparable from these, and cannot be treated in isolation. All the policies of capitalist reorganisation, all the policies of Fascism, can only hasten the advance to war. This is equally true of the line of a Roosevelt, a MacDonald or a Hitler. War is no sudden eruption of a new factor from outside, a vaguely future menace to be exorcised by special machinery, but is already in essence implicit in the existing factors, in the existing driving forces and policies of capitalism."
Allowing individuals to hoard enough wealth to corrupt, at will, the system that gave them their wealth - maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all.
It's not like the Soviets fared much better with regards to corruption and institutional decay, to the part where the rampant corruption of the Brezhnev-era was a major contributing cause to the eventual collapse of the union.
Institutional longevity is largely an unsolved problem. Seems having checks and balances like the US does helps slow it down to some extent, but is far from a guarantee.
Not sure I follow the link to the Soviets, but yes they certainly excelled at letting too few people accumulate too much power too. If only we were able to learn a little more from history.
Important context is January is historically the month where most layoffs are enacted. Not saying the number is insignificant, just not entirely unexpected.
Readit News
https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p...
GOP is the fun dad party and Dems are the mommy party.
Republicans run economy hot until it blows, then Dems get voted in to clean up. People get annoyed about taxes and regulation when economy is ok again, fun dad promises ice cream and pizza for dinner forever.. rinse & repeat.
It's also very hard to assume that Reagan being elected in 76 would've avoided the oil-driven inflation at the end of that decade.
But of course, we've decided as a country/media to generally blame Biden for non-policy factors that put the economy on a wild bullwhip ride from 2020-to-2023ish, soooooo... maybe Reagan can deal with getting the blame for the inflation too!
For the most part the correlation between administrations and the economy is arbitrary. But in this case I would make a case that it is causative.
In addition, it's the circles that person runs in and the circles that person's people run in. Do you think judge or cabinet appointments are decided on by one person? Sure, the President is a figurehead in this position and ultimately has to say yes or no, but there's a large pool of candidates out there and it's up to the staffers, maybe friends, maybe people in the know to propose those people to the President.
So while on paper the President doesn't, or shouldn't have that much power--in actuality with our current political process it's certainly much more.
Now, that said, just like the billionaires--they can only control so much. At least in the United States, there are competing interests even among the wealthy class, and sometimes shit just sort of happens--like a meteor killing the dinosaurs....or the release of decades of e-mails, videos, documents, and communications surrounding their pedophile behavior on a secret island in the Caribbean.
Why? What if constantly launching foreign wars, leveraging up the financial system and running up deficits isn’t sound economic policy?
Of course everything is nuanced; the trend is merely interesting especially juxtaposed against people consistently voting for republicans for "economic" reasons.
He creates uncertainty and it’s hard to see how that helps the US economy.
Many now talk like they work for the president.
The Fed seems to be the big driver of the economy. Other than that, the government is moving things at the margins. Even Trumps tariff shenanigans don't seem to have rocked the boat much.
JOLTS is where stress shows first. Openings fall,[1] hiring slows,[2] quits drop,[3] and layoffs rise later.[4] Biden in particular shows the weakness of your provided stats.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSHIL
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUL
[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL
The charts paint a much more precise picture on what is happening, and I actually don't see anything that strongly support it being a partisan effect.
Can you explain why? Given that it's presumably averaged over the president's entire term, doesn't that provide a good measure of how much jobs were added under a given administration?
I never once heard a reasonable explanation why policies only start to have an effect at the end of a year that is divisible by 4 or 8. It makes no sense if you think it through.
This seems to confirm that Joe Biden created the most jobs of any president in recent modern history.
Democratic administrations also engage in and promote discriminatory hiring policies which flagrantly violate the civil rights act (Title VII specifically).
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e...
It would also pay to keep in mind that the link claims that the preceding layoffs hit the same group. Ie, they were the ones there to be hired after losing their jobs.
It also says that people of colour are underrepresented in the job market (in the companies measured in your link) when compared to their overall makeup of the population.
Correcting that would take some years of imbalance in hiring.
For example, the housing crisis and bubble were largely driven by legislation passed years earlier, including the 1999 repeal of Glass Steagall under Clinton. That was passed by a Republican controlled Congress, and the crisis eventually exploded under Bush. So I do not think either Clinton or Bush can be directly blamed for the housing crash. It is the repeal of the glass steagall act.
And was the dot com bubble crash in early 2000s caused by Clinton or by Bush? Or some legalization passed a long time ago? Or it just a business cycle?
More broadly, I would argue that presidents, and even legislators, have limited control over the actual health of the economy. Are we going to say Trump is responsible for the AI boom? And if this AI boom collapses into a massive bubble burst under the next administration, will that president be blamed instead?
The question you should /really/ be asking, since taxes are involved, is, was that hiring actually effective? Did we create jobs that actually provided lasting value to the world? Or did we just juice the numbers for the polls?
One party develops, the other party cracks down on potential economic wins for the working class.
Both parties make sure the capitalist class stay in power.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Over the last few decades, neither party has really cared about deficits anyway. Everyone’s been spending, just at different speeds. The real question isn’t “who creates more jobs,” it’s whether the spending is efficient, sustainable, and actually creates long-term value. Eventually the bills come due, interest costs rise, and priorities shift from growth to just keeping the lights on.
So yeah, Democrats tend to show stronger job numbers, but spending more will almost always do that. Whether it’s good spending is a separate debate. Budget discipline isn’t partisan, it’s just basic economics.
Thats not necessarily true. During Bill Clinton's presidency he cut the deficits and the debt and yet the economy saw very strong job growth.
https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-und...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_created_during_U.S._presi...
You're confusing rhetoric with policy.
Deleted Comment
We're searching the phones of visiting punk kids. We're cruelly punishing Canadian residents for clerical errors by unnecessarily detaining them. We've told our own citizens that it's reasonable to interrogate them at any moment for looking brown or black. We told an entire class of people they simply do not exist as they or even their family, friends, and coworkers understand them. Finally, we're deporting people who, although they've been here unlawfully for years, have also contributed a great deal. I've left out the most egregious examples to remain focused on the system.
All of this is happening as a backdrop while droves of US-born and immigrant citizens alike lose their jobs and are unable to find new ones. To say the irony is palpable is an understatement.
As an ex East German, I wonder how much of it is the disappearance of the competing model. Some of the old communists actually warned about this. Don't get me wrong, I participated in the demonstrations back then, socialism had clearly failed as a society and economically. Does not make that particular idea wrong though. The powerful want to go back, take back the power they think is theirs, consciously or as a reflex.
Note that Europe, Germany in particular, are far from the "socialist" examples some, or many, Americans think, welfare state and all that. Fact is, when it comes to rigid stratification of society, who rules, who owns, Germany is far on the side of capital, and according to a study the few thousand people at the very top are from the same 4% of the population almost exclusively.
What is happening in the US is happening in more places. Here in Germany we too now have more and more attacks on social systems. It's never the fault of inept leadership, no the people must work more and longer! They have zero new ideas. That is the only one they can think of. I am not really exaggerating, even the representatives of our powerful "Mittelstand" (much of Germany's industry) heavily criticized especially the conservative CDU in the government only a few days ago, publicly.
I see no reason to try to blame the Chinese, or the Russians, or anyone. All of it comes from within, and not just in the US.
Both these times were plausible ways of entering the middle class.
What does economic theory say should happen to labor when scarcity ends but capital is strong? Does the economy expand until there’s more labor demand? Or will structural and monopolistic problems cause capital to benefit while suppressing wages - making us all serfs?
"War begins to be presented as the heroic alternative, the last hope, the “way out” from the unending nightmare of economic crisis, misery and unemployment. Fascism, the most complete expression of modern capitalism, glorifies war. The filthy sophism “War means Work” begins to be circulated by the poison agencies of imperialism, and filters down to the masses. ... War is only the continuation and working out of the crisis of capitalism and of the present policies of capitalism. It is inseparable from these, and cannot be treated in isolation. All the policies of capitalist reorganisation, all the policies of Fascism, can only hasten the advance to war. This is equally true of the line of a Roosevelt, a MacDonald or a Hitler. War is no sudden eruption of a new factor from outside, a vaguely future menace to be exorcised by special machinery, but is already in essence implicit in the existing factors, in the existing driving forces and policies of capitalism."
- R.P. Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1935
But who knew?
Institutional longevity is largely an unsolved problem. Seems having checks and balances like the US does helps slow it down to some extent, but is far from a guarantee.
Deleted Comment