US economy continues to collapse
This is no surprise. Bush and company has been pouring the economy into the toilet for years. I think he's about ready to flush. This from Bloomberg.
Employers in the U.S. fired workers in July for a seventh straight month and cut hours for remaining staff to a record low, signaling economic growth weakened at the start of the second half of the year. Americans labored an average 33 hours and 36 minutes per week, six minutes less than in June and matching the shortest workweek since records began in 1964, the Labor Department said yesterday in Washington. The jobless rate jumped to 5.7 percent, the highest level in more than four years.Once he pushes that handle, it's gonna be a whole lot harder to recover what's been lost. In any case, I think that, even though he is a lame duck and losing some of his power, the worst is yet to come.
posted by Libby Spencer at 6:31 AM
4 Comments:
It's certainly bad. One thing that told us this is that it began in a relatively good position, interest rates were low and employment was (by the measures used) full. So the credit level when saturation hit was high. The highly securitised market began to lock up, short term lending to institutions died, and now we've reached a stage where anything bad that happens makes everything else worse.
That is, things are truly self-catalysing, despite the monumental and historic efforts by the fed. Inventories are high, prices are slipping, LTVs are rising and LTVs acceptable for new loans are dropping, without new loans credit cards are drying up, consumer spending is collapsing and corporations are closing down sites, which in turn noone wants to buy.
And the only way to even fight this thing, is probably to spend taxpayer money to subsidise the mistakes of those who had money to invest.
Makes me wonder at certain presidential candidates who plan to overtax businesses even more, which encourages them to fire even more workers.
Trickle down economics is a failure and Bush as much as admitted it by authorizing the recent 3-6 hundred dollar rebate package to taxpayers.
Business is not booming or suffering just because of taxes. They've had a windfall now for years and they are still going under.
And if big business doesn't pay their fair share of the taxes necessary to maintain two wars, just who is supposed to do that?
The problem with business today is not taxes. The problem is that they're not doing business. The problem is that the tax we pay for everything; the tax that's ballooning our of control is fuel prices and the inflation it's causing.
We have had boom years when the top tax rate was 90% and none of these Reaganauts can give you honest figures correlating taxes with general prosperity. It's all dogma and it's time we all stopped taking it on faith.
The bottom line is that taxes are low for some because all of us are stuck with huge foreign debts and if you believe any of these people know anything about economics, I have a perpetual motion machine to sell you.
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