“meanless?”
by the way I think it’s amazing how dead on the person who wrote this article was! 9 years ago and he hit the nail on the friggin head! In short Clinton left us a ticking time bomb!!!
Barry Bonds doesn’t knock them all out of the park.
LOL this article sheds light on the ROOT cause of the current economic disaster we’re in and you’re like “eh **** it it’s still bush’s fault” when it clearly states that Clinton pushed for this. This was printed in the NY Times one of the most liberal publications out there so don’t even try and say it’s bias!
Thanks… since I"m not well versed in the stock market (shame on me)… I will post someone’s comment to the reactions of this article back in 2003.
A likely explanation, but it fails to take into account that the economy is emotionally-driven and its health is very much dependent not only on fiscal policy, but future outlook.
With the dawn of the failed Bush Administration, I think the nation sank into an emotional depression. Everyone I spoke to expressed a sense of dread and many suggested, early on, that we might not even survive this mess.
Indeed the attacks of September 11th, predicated primarily on Bush’s big mouth, underscored the dangers. The subsequent rise in unemployment, a further increase in an already well-entrenched trend, was not just a result of the attacks - it was a happening thing.
For historyís sake, one need only look at the first Failed Bush Administration, where unemployment rose as did the deficit. Perhaps many of us felt a little more at ease than we do now. It seems, in retrospect, that at least we had someone with a brain in charge, as opposed to the current joke.
I think stories and analysis of economic outlook should take into account the emotional health of the nation (and the world). This is critical in understanding how things became the way they are and, more importantly, where theyíre going.
Remember ñ Roosevelt did many good things for Americanís suffering during the depression ñ but one of the most important is often overlooked. He gave them hope.
Mark Richards
Boston
Posted by Mark Richards on May 11, 2003 at 6:59 PM
also:
Great article, but I would have liked to see more discussion of how we got to this point - and the fact that the policies that got us here are continuing. And what about a fourth bubble: debt?
“When a flood of new inventions gives opportunity to make more than the current rate of interest there is always a tendency to go into debt, in order to make money out of inventions, and to the ordinary investor this comes in the form of investing in common stocks. At such time, the rate of interest should be high, embracing as it does the opportunity to invest
for a high rate of return over cost. If there is a great discrepancy between the rate to be realised to the investor from his investment, and the rate of interest on which he can borrow, he will be inclined to borrow all the more.” Paul Warburg The Theory of Interest, New York 1930
Interest rates have been forced down, liquidity pushed up and people have “borrowed all the more”. First for stocks, now for real estate.
And the government is certainly leading by example. Look at these deficits! Debt, Debt and more debt.
Posted by Karin Deming on May 12, 2003 at 8:05 PM
and:
Baker’s article excellently describes the current economic turmoil we are facing the United States, and does an admirable job explaining how we got here. However, I think a more nuanced critique of dollar policy is needed.
The Globe and Mail reported yesterday that the Bush Administration has aggressivley pursued the decline int the dollar’s value, letting it slide 17% as it has a stimulative effect on the U.S economy, something especially important considering the slump we are in and considering that the fed has little room to move. While a strong dollar may be buoyant for particular segments of the econony, as Baker noted, it has devastated manufacturing, which continues to contract. Mind you this isn’t praise of the return to Voodoo Economics (absent James Baker’s obsessive quest for the strong dollar), nor any kind of defense of the Bush team’s economic vision. Instead, it really is a twofold query:
-
what would prompt the fed to raise rates at any time in the near future, except political suicide, especially as we near another presidential electoral cycle?
-
If the Fed at some point does feel constrained to slam on the brakes, raising rates while the dollar continues to lose value,
where will the economic solution come from that will keep the economy from suffering a total meltdown?
Posted by Geoff Miller on May 13, 2003 at 6:42 AM
to me it sounds like a few “arm chair QB’s” throwing their opinions out there.
Though I didn’t spend the time reading every post, I read many and the one thing most seem to forget is that all this change doesn’t just come from the president. It has to make it through Congress. Despite the fact that Congress is going to be a majority of Democrats, it will always be the basics of politics: Who will fill their pockets? This is just a group of money hungry vultures and they will do what ever gets them re-elected so they can drive thier Benz. Bottom line. People will “predict” the future for some time, but this is just a panic because the big change is that a half black guy won the presidency. He may be the best thing to happen to this country, or he might suck, but only time will tell. Try to have a little faith that we still have the most bad ass country in the world. Vote Chuck Norris in 2012!
i would imagine that we all qualify as armchair QBs.
All I’m saying is that they seem to give responses based on emotion rather than provide facts to back up their accusations. The author provided facts to back up his point…
i’m just too lazy to type more than two sentences. See?
More food for thought. This is the kind of “honesty” and “change” we have to look forward to…
More NAFTA Nonsense
March 3, 2008
An Obama mailer uses dubious, disputed statistics about how much the trade deal hurt Ohio workers.
Summary
Barack Obama’s campaign is distributing a mailer in Ohio that plays upon anti-NAFTA feelings in the Buckeye State. But the flyer is misleading:
* Obama is quoted as saying that "one million jobs have been lost because of NAFTA, including nearly 50,000 jobs here in Ohio." But those figures are highly questionable and from an anti-NAFTA source. Other economic studies have concluded the trade deal resulted in much smaller job losses or even a small net gain.
* The mailer quotes Hillary Clinton as saying "NAFTA has been good for New York and America." That quote, however, is taken out of context. She also said in that same news conference that NAFTA was flawed and old trade deals needed to be revisited.
Analysis
Opposition to NAFTA plays well among Democratic, blue collar voters in Ohio. But the latest salvo from Barack Obama’s campaign, a glossy, four-page mailer, uses dubious statistics and an out-of-context quote from Hillary Clinton to appeal to the electorate.
Obama mailer imageOne Million Lost?
The mailer claims that “one million jobs have been lost because of NAFTA, including nearly 50,000 … in Ohio,” but those numbers are from a disputed estimate by a liberal think tank with ties to labor unions that opposed the trade deal. We first wrote about the figure in August, when John Edwards used it in a Democratic debate.
The Economic Policy Institute’s Robert Scott, an economist, wrote in a Sept. 2006 report that “[e]xport growth since 1994 [when NAFTA went into effect] supported an additional 1 million U.S. jobs, while imports displaced domestic production that would support 2 million jobs.” That’s a net “displacement,” not an actual “loss,” of 1 million jobs. Scott refers to this as 1 million lost “opportunities” as distinct from existing jobs.
Scott’s figures also have been questioned by other economists. Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Jeffrey J. Schott of the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, which has connections to the corporate world, criticized Scott’s report for assuming that NAFTA was the cause for the total growth in the trade deficit between the U.S. and both Canada and Mexico. They said that assumption ignored other factors.
Another earlier study included an estimate of job loss that was half as high as Scott’s figure, and it also said NAFTA may have resulted in a net gain in employment when offsetting job gains are taken into account. In 2004, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said 525,000 workers had lost their jobs because of NAFTA, according to the NAFTA Trade Adjustment Assistance program, a U.S. government program that gives assistance to those affected by the trade agreement. (Our fact-checking colleague at the Washington Post, Michael Dobbs, pointed to this study last fall.) The report said those jobs “were likely offset by other jobs gained,” while noting that “the impact on losers is an economic and political concern.” The report also said that there had been “widely diverging estimates” on job loss by both proponents and critics of the trade agreement, adding that such estimates “have been unpersuasive.” It concluded that the impact from NAFTA on U.S. employment had been minor:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: NAFTA’s net effect on jobs in the United States has been minuscule, given the size of the U.S. economy and the importance of other trading partners. The best models to date suggest that
NAFTA has caused either no net change in employment or a very small net gain of jobs.
Also in 2004, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service evaluated four studies on the subject, including the Carnegie Endowment’s, and said that
“NAFTA had little or no impact on aggregate employment.” It also concluded, contrary to Scott’s report, that “NAFTA did not cause the widening U.S. trade deficit with Mexico.”
NAFTA critics often point to the loss of manufacturing jobs, which have declined by 3.1 million between Jan. 1994, when NAFTA was implemented, and January of this year. But total nonfarm employment, meanwhile, has increased by 25.6 million in the same time period. Whatever effect NAFTA may have had on U.S. jobs, however, Obama is relying on a statistic that has been criticized, questioned and contradicted by other researchers.
An Incomplete Quote
Obama’s mailer goes on to ask, “Is Hillary Clinton running away from her own record on trade deals that have cost Ohio nearly 50,000 jobs?” It then lists various quotes from Clinton on NAFTA, the most recent of which is a truncated version of the senator’s remarks. The mailer quotes Clinton saying in Jan. 2004, “I think on balance NAFTA has been good for New York and America.” As we said previously, the full context of those remarks, made in response to questions in a news teleconference, shows that Clinton advocated revisiting and renegotiating trade agreements. In that teleconference, she said she “always thought” that old trade agreements should be revisited and that environmental, health and labor standards should be added. “I think that we need a re-thinking of our trade policies,” she said.
The Clinton campaign has sent out its own misleading mailer on NAFTA, trying to convince Ohio voters that Obama has praised the trade agreement in the past. Campaign rhetoric aside, the two candidates’ positions on NAFTA are virtually the same.
– by Lori Robertson
WOW just WOW!! This is how its going to be in 4 years. Everyone pointing fingers at everybody. My fingers for the time being are just crossed!
More Obama “straight talk”…
Posted: February 26, 2008
9:31 pm Eastern
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
Sen. Barack Obama (WND photo)
WASHINGTON – Leading Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has blasted rival Hillary Rodham Clinton for flip-flopping on NAFTA, but, according to the public record, he has also switch positions.
Obama has turned trade into a centerpiece of his campaign in Ohio, where trade agreements are particularly unpopular as domestic manufacturing jobs disappear.
Texas and Ohio hold nominating contests March 4, and Obama has criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement at campaign stops in both states.
“What the world should interpret is my consistent position, which is I believe in trade,” he said after meeting with workers at a manufacturing plant in Ohio. “I just want to make sure that the rules of the road apply to everybody and they are fair and that they reflect the interests of workers and not just corporate profits.”
Just last October, however, Obama announced he would vote for a Peruvian trade agreement that would expand NAFTA into that country.
In fact, he was the first presidential candidate to declare support for the NAFTA expansion. He was also the keynote speaker at a luncheon of the Hamilton Project – a Wall Street group working to drive a wedge between Democrats and organized labor on globalization issues.
More…
February 26, 2008
NAFTA Nonsense
By Rich Lowry
For Barack Obama, hope can triumph over anything, except for open trade with a neighboring country with an economy 1/20th the size of ours. Then, all is despair.
Obama’s culprit is Mexico, our third-largest trading partner. It is trade deals like NAFTA – the 1993 accord eliminating tariffs among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada – that “ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with teenagers for minimum wage at Wal-Mart,” Obama intones. Feel inspired yet?
The big picture doesn’t justify this Dickensian evocation of gloom. Since 1993, the U.S. economy has grown by 54 percent. The jobless rate has dropped from 6.9 percent in 1993 to 4.9 percent today. Manufacturing output has increased by 63 percent. Canada and Mexico are our first- and second-largest export markets, and U.S. merchandise exports to them have increased at a slightly faster clip than exports to the rest of the world.
NAFTA has clearly been a (small) benefit to the economy of both the U.S. and Mexico. Critics focus on the large U.S. trade deficit that opened up with Mexico shortly after the adoption of NAFTA, but that had more to do with the decline of the peso and a steep Mexican recession that dampened demand for our exports. Since 2001, our manufactured-goods deficit with NAFTA countries has been stable, making the agreement an implausible villain in the hollowing out of America.
Obama’s complaint, ultimately, is with the long-term liberalization of the Mexican economy. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Mexico joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, lowered its tariff rates, reduced restrictions on foreign investment and deregulated state industries. As a result, both U.S. exports to and imports from Mexico grew rapidly prior to NAFTA.
Because of this dynamic, the Congressional Budget Office estimates almost all of the increased trade between the U.S. and Mexico would have happened without NAFTA. The effect of the agreement itself – rather than the broad trend of liberalization – was marginal. “Relative to the size of the economy,” the CBO writes, “the increases in exports never exceeded 0.12 percent of U.S. GDP, and the increases in imports never exceeded 0.11 percent of U.S. GDP.”
To blame NAFTA for the long-standing trajectory of U.S. manufacturing – the sector has been losing jobs since 1979 – is the politics of scapegoating. What is Obama going to do if elected? Browbeat Mexican President Felipe Calderón to return his country to the statist and autarkic policies of the 1970s? Bizarrely, Obama lately has directed more barbs toward Mexico than Iran, whose offense is only killing American servicemen and pursuing an illicit nuclear program rather than sending us imports and welcoming our investment.
In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama maintains a studied ambivalence about NAFTA. He didn’t emphasize populist broadsides against the deal until it became imperative for him to win down-scale white voters in states like Wisconsin and Ohio. On the merits, it’s an odd time to demonize NAFTA. U.S. manufacturing went through a deep recession from 2000 to 2003, shedding 3 million jobs. It has recovered since, and 2006 was “a record year for output, revenues, profits, profit rates and return on investment,” Daniel Ikenson of the Cato Institute writes.
As Frank Vargo of the National Association of Manufacturers points out, when manufacturing jobs drastically declined from 2000 to 2003, manufactured-goods imports essentially were stagnant. Trade affected the manufacturing recession not through an increase in imports, but a decline in exports. That, coupled with a decline in domestic consumption of manufactured goods coinciding with the U.S. recession, accounted for the large job losses.
Obama always says that politicians should tell voters what they need – not what they want – to hear. But no one in the Democratic party will emphatically say that trade is a net benefit to the U.S., even if it brings painful – and ultimately unavoidable – dislocations. Hillary Clinton always was lukewarm about NAFTA, and even Bill is skittering away from his legacy. On trade, Barack Obama’s opportunistic fear-mongering defines the new Democratic orthodoxy.
Looks like Wall Street investors are really pleased with the election of O-BUM-A since the stock market tanked over 900 points since Tuesday…
Better update your W4’s soon so you can avoid having to pay the IRS a large lump sum next year after the Bush tax cuts are repealed…
What a bunch of stupid faggots we have here in this country…all you assholes who drank the kool-aid and voted for “change”…well you’re sure gonna get it…the next four years are going to make the Jimmy Carter era look like an economic boom!
Welcome to the USSA…
BooSSted_SS Quit copy/ paste we don’t give a f uck
Yep. Where I work we have performance reviews and accountability. Try saying that to a union.
And maybe we could get rid of some unneccesary government functions if the country wasn’t so afraid, or unaware, of a third party. I did my part this year.
x2
all you people that voted for “change” have no idea what kind of change you were voting for. Noone knows **** about obama other than what he said on the campaign trail, and we all know how truthful that is.
If you are a college kid with no real grasp of the world, I can see getting all fired up and voting for obama. But anyone over the age of say 25 and is still a liberal democrat, is just stupid. good job retards :bigthumb:
Just because you have no idea what the F uck I posted don’t mean it’s not relevant…
^^ Not to mention (and to respond to a previous comment) You’re right, the President has a whole team that’s in place that is supposed to keep things in check before decisions/policies/whatever are made. Problem is it’s those people I’m worried about, there’s no one to keep them in check anymore and some of the people he’s appointing are more radical/crazy than he is.