So why is the recovery dying?

[ShockediSay]

Because big corporate money greed goes untaxed
and does what it did to cause the Great Recession; it puts
its untaxed money into bubbles. This time around it's energy,
food and commodities. Anything but create jobs.

Before their bubbles were subprime mortgages, Wall Street,
the economy, big banks etc.

Cuts, cuts, cuts without Big Corporate Money tax restoration,
just drives us in deeper and gets us more of same.

Why are our Congress members not loud and clear on this!?!
Why isn't Obama!?!

[Vanje]

1. We needed jobs

not bubbles.

[Shagbark Hickory]

4. +!

[WatsonT]

58. Yep

People with jobs buy things.

They have the security to invest in houses. And pay taxes, and buy things on credit. And send their kids to school and so on.

No jobs = no recovery.

Doesn't matter how much money wallstreet has.

[ixion]

2. Because there never was a recovery

there was a dying economy on life support. Now the life support has run out and the economy is moving towards being D.O.A again.

[Coyote_Bandit]

11. +1,000,000

Exactly.

An economy where consumer sending represents two-thirds of GDP is ultimately unsustainable. Particularly when credit is unavailable.

There has been no acknowledgement of the fundamental ills in our economy - much less an effort to fix them.

The creeps that run the government are either evil or pretty fucking stupid.

[customerserviceguy]

22. Yes, there were signs that there was a recovery

but they're based on old-fashioned notions of what constitutes a recovery, and were not valid in the present situation. This whole thing looks like a three year recession to me.

[Creideiki]

40. Closer to decade-long where I'm sitting.

[sloughtermark]

56. Life support

I don't think the US government has even the smallest clue on what to do next for the US economy. What are they going to do next? Lower the prime lending rate to negative numbers?? I think it's a permanent slow death and things are going to get a lot worse in the years to come.

[Doctor Hurt]

3. who says its dying?

It's slow. Dunno that it's dying.

[JoePhilly]

62. Same folks who said it last June when the DOW hit 9800.

Its kind of like those end of the world folks ... they predict the end of the world on a regular basis, hoping that at some point they will be able to scream ..... "AHHH HAAAA!!!" .... "I told you so".

Since Obama took office, this prediction has been made almost quarterly. And single piece of bad economic news can kick it off. And any good piece of economic news will be discarded.

Maybe this time they'll be right. But personally, I don't follow DU for its stellar predictions on economic trends.

If I did, I would have sold everything last summer at 9800.

[MinneapolisMatt]

5. Ask the republicans and the banks.

Banks aren't lending, and the republicans obstruct anything good for the country. The end.

[glinda]

17. Right.

[high density]

6. The core issue of corporations not wanting to pay livable wages remains

Nobody can afford to by their stuff.

[applegrove]

7. Because corporations depend now on demand from around the world

to make profits so they don't care/are not dependant on American buying power anymore. Plus unemployment fights inflation for the rich. Plus it hurts Obama politically.

[Little Star]

34. Bingo! They don't need American buying power anymore. n/t

[Curmudgeoness]

8. One thing that the markets and business does not like,

and that is uncertainty. And with all the rhetoric from the Reps about everything being "off the table", there is concern that they are really willing to shit where they eat and let everything go to hell.

[ShockediSay]

54. This uncertainty business is just more Right Wing Propaganda paid for by Big corporate $ Greed nt

[The Wielding Truth]

9. KICK and Recommend!

[sendero]

10. There never was a recovery..

... and if Obama thinks there was he is not intellectually fit to be president.

[nevergiveup]

15. and if we had continued loosing jobs

at 700,000 a month what would you have called that?

[JoeyT]

25. Getting worse.

Recovery means "Getting better" not "Not getting worse as fast". It never really was a recovery.

[sendero]

35. A quicker version..

... of what is to come anyway. That's what I'd call it because that is what it is.

[WatsonT]

59. An even worse recession

Less bad is not the same thing as good.


For isntance, if you go to the doctor with cancer that is aggressively spreading and he treats it such that it is aggressively spreading, but at only half the original rate, are you cured?

[WillyT]

12. K & R !!!

:kick:

[TorchTheWitch]

13. what recovery?

There is no recovery when average people aren't recovering. It's still just as hard to get a job, jobs are still being lost, homes are still being foreclosed on in droves, gas and food prices skyrocket again... where is this recovery? It's still just as bad as it was before... if not worse.

[GSLevel9]

14. sorry can't agree with a single word.

The question is "why is the recovery dying"

1) That's making the fanciful assumption that there EVER was a recovery.

2) The ONLY way out of this is for BUSINESSES to GROW, unless you want to print money and give it away (see Germany circa 1920's) all you have to do is look at the Clinton 1990's... possibly the HIGH WATER MARK of this nation in the last 50 years...

[zeemike]

21. I take the other view, that businesses must die.

The big ones....big, bloated, and full of waste and fraud.
And in their places smaller more efficient businesses that are sustainable, and provide something of real value to the country.
To expect the obese businesses to continue to grow is suicide for the nation.

[Little Star]

36. You have a good point! n/t

[azul]

45. Good thinking. Big businesses collapsed the economy.

Why were not they broken up and let fail instead of propping them up with taxpayer dollars and hoping that things would seem the same and people would muddle through somehow?

How many international businesses were saved and rewarded by US taxpayers for bad behavior?

[Newest Reality]

16. The select few have

recovered, and then some.

We are left to pay for it in so many ways that we can't even imagine them yet.

Recovery was doublespeak. You had to ask for who and how. Now, it is far too late. We are going to hurt badly all the way through this unless we find the courage to respond in correspondingly reciprocal way. We can either take it or decide, en masse, not to.

I, for one, am sick of having riders, as I have come to call them. They ride us like beasts of burden while using the carrot on the stick of their mass media to sculpt and conform our collective understanding in a way that keeps them going.

The thing is, we are not so powerless. In fact, if we all stood-up today and said, unequivocally no, we won't do this anymore, they would have a real problem on their hands. The powerful and wealthy are but a few in our midst. I will hand it to them, they have done a precise and successful job so far. However, I am counting on the critical mass of our people to come to terms with the information available and let their guts guide them to a resolution of this crisis so that we all may find some peace and more prosperity in our lives and leave something of value and a livable planet to our children and future generations.

The time has come.

[Vinee]

18. because we need more smoke and bigger mirrors.

[Stinky The Clown]

19. We lack leadership concerned for the common man over the rich few.

[Lil Missy]

20. Not enough stimulous.

[customerserviceguy]

23. As I've long said

we don't get to a true recovery until housing prices have hit bottom. And we don't know when they've hit bottom until they either spike back upwards a bit, or just simply stabilize over a long period of time, six months or so.

And we don't hit that point until the backlog of foreclosure properties is pretty much gone. I don't support the sloppy-ass ways that the banks have done foreclosures, but clearly, most foreclosed homeowners were simply not going to be able to meet their obligations that were incurred when the markets were at the top of the bubble. It is best that the homes properly foreclosed on be freed from the stigma that bad foreclosure practices by a few have cast on the many, as a way to reach that bottom just a bit more quickly.

We have to stop the bleeding.

[RaleighNCDUer]

24. Because the Republicans took the house. nt

[deacon]

27. They haven't even tried to create one job. n/t

[Le Taz Hot]

47. And the Democrats have?

:shrug:

[StarsInHerHair]

26. the same cut-happy tactics are failing to work as advertized in UK

I just saw how Bernie Madoff's personal belongings were being auctioned off-remember I think FDR did the same thing to the Banksters & their stolen loot-THAT IS WHAT WE need NOW.

[Kablooie]

28. Republicans want it to remain bad so they will win and Obama doesn't want to cause waves.

[lib2DaBone]

29. Agree. There never was a recession for the top 1% or Government...

I went downtown yesterday and drove by the Federal Bank, the Federal Courthouse and other Govt Offices.

I counted no less then 20 brand new vehicles in service to various departments: Homeland Security, Federal Building Police, ICE, Immigration, TSA, etc. (mostly all large, white, gas-guzzling SUV's)

Congress still gets solid-gold free health care along with an outrageous salary. Federal workers enjoy some the highest wages around. The federal court buildings have solid marble floors with thousands of highly paid security personnel standing around.. waiting to wand and frisk the unwashed and homeless mass caught in their web.

You are correct. For big corps, big govt and the top 1%.. things are just fine.. while he other 99% struggle for a crust of bread.

I can't see anything Mr. Obama has done to help the working poor or middle class.

[Drahthaardogs]

33. Correction...

Federal Blue Collar workers enjoy some of the highest wages in their chose field. Federal white collar workers are paid about 20% less than their private sector counterparts.

[Lorien]

60. Provide links. nt

[Drahthaardogs]

61. LInks

But federal employee advocates claim a straight-up comparison of average total compensation is misleading. A disproportionate number of federal employees are professionals, such as managers, lawyers, engineers and scientists. Over the years, the federal government has steadily outsourced lower-paying jobs to the private sector so that blue-collar workers cooking meals or working in mailrooms now make up just 10 percent of federal employees.

That argument is backed up by a 2002 study of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It found that federal salaries for most professional and administrative jobs lagged well behind compensation offered in the private sector.


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/FACT-CHECK-Are-federal-apf-3113687231.html?x=0

[Trajan]

30. It's because they never addressed the REAL cause .... in my view ...

The economy sputtered because the 3 decades of wage suppression and union busting proffered by conservative policies has been hugely successful ...

People simply do not have spendable income that would power increased economic activity .... They are tapped by rising prices and moribund wage increases ...

Over time, there is a point reached when 10% price increases intersect with 3% wage increases, and the economy comes to a grinding halt .... LESS people buying less goods, so less production required to fill orders, and more jobs hacked away in this sick spiral to the bottom ...

THIS is what a conservative economy looks like ..... LOW wages, POOR sales, and a degenerate, dwindling system ....

Either income has to increase, or prices will have to eventually drop in the manner of price deflation ....

Loss of sales is due directly to loss of income .....

[annabanana]

31. The beltway bubble is damn near impenetrable.. What the

hell is it MADE of anyway?

[JHB]

38. Money, snobbery, and party invitations. n/t

[PuffedMica]

32. Republicans believe their chances of defeating Obama improve if the economy does not improve

The policies of the Democrats have our foot on the gas but the Republican actions have their foot on the brake. We need to get out and vote more Democrats into office.

[rusty fender]

42. That worked so well in 2008!

It brought us Lily Ledbetter! Wow, just think what it could be like with more Democrats: Obama will immediately enact a WPA-like jobs program; he'll end NAFTA and GATT, and will bring American jobs back to America; he'll end our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan! Yes--all we need is more Democrats!:dem: :kick: :woohoo: :applause:

[Marr]

57. It's more like the Democrats are trying to deliver the car to Wall Street,

and the Republicans are pushing the brake so they can be the ones to deliver the car to Wall Street.

[Distant Observer]

37. Unless Obama rallies public outrage against the Rep job-kill strategy NOW, he may be done

He was hoping that the natural "cyclical" job recovery pattern would be on his side.

The Republicans can kill this recovery because this is not like the past when most companies had to hire locally.

This assumption is now FALSE.

The big employers can either leverage technology expenditure or hire globally to avoid risk and maintain profits quite safely.

[Vinca]

39. Because, like a DU post the other day noted, items we use and buy -

Levis and Hanes undies - are made in countries like Haiti by workers paid pennies a day with no benefits. As long as corporations are able to do this without penalty, America will become more and more like a third world country with people scraping by on multiple minimum wage jobs. .

[RaleighNCDUer]

41. Other countries sign these 'free trade' agreements in the mistaken belief

that bringing in US corporations will raise THEIR standard of living, but they do nothing to guarantee a living wage in their own countries which allows slave wages - rather, they bend to corporate pressure (do what we want or we will go somewhere else) which keeps their workers in poverty.

If corporations were compelled to pay a living wage in these countries, the effects would be several:
1) The workers there would earn enough to actually be able to spend on more than mere subsistance themselves, increasing US markets;
2) The corporations would have to more closely examine the profits margin of moving a plant overseas and keeping it in the States, resulting in fewer jobs going overseas, increasing their domestic markets;
3) The increased markets, both in the US and outside it, will result in a lower profit MARGIN, but higher actual profits.

So, what do corporations have against making money?

[kentuck]

43. Nothing that a good round of supply-side economics can't finish off...

This is the last chance folks. One more round of Reaganomics and this economy is dead beyond reviving. This is it.

[OmahaBlueDog]

44. The recovery is not a straight upward line

Right now, high fuel prices are not helping, and there are major supply chain disruptions due to events in Japan.

There is still a housing glut. This is a condition that will exist for the foreseeable future. Greatest Generationers and early Boomers are leaving houses to kids who may or may not want them, and moving on into late-life living arrangements (independent living/assisted living/etc.). The overcapacity in residential real estate is a big part of why the bubble burst, and will stay down for the next 15 years or so.

That said, banks are doing some lending, and commercial building is picking up. It's not a great place to be, but it's better than '08-'09.

I't going to be a slow, grinding economy for a while.

[MadHound]

46. Because in reality, there was never a recovery to begin with,

The only "recovery" was in the financial sector. So while the uptick in the financial sector helped buoy up the numbers and talking points that there was a recovery, out here in the real world, there was no recovery whatsoever.

Instead, we have continued to bump along the bottom, hammered by what is, in reality, double digit unemployment, rising prices across the board, a glutted housing market, a decreased manufacturing sector that is getting smaller everyday, and if you are lucky enough to have a job, watching your real world wages continue to slide.

The steps that the Democrats and this administration took were too weak, too little. What is needed is a serious job creation program that is on par with what took place under FDR. Furthermore, steps need to be taken to bring back our manufacturing sector, and one of those steps shouldn't be simply continue to decrease Americans' wages until they're on par with India. Rather we should yank China's MFN trading status, put serious taxes on corporations who ship manufacturing overseas, and even possibly instituting some import tariffs.

Otherwise we're going to suffer an ongoing erosion of wages, quality of life, and the middle class. There will be no true recovery, just prolonged agony.

[GliderGuider]

48. Here's another view of the situation

Suppose I said "Because the net energy from oil has declined too far to make further debt creation infeasible." That sentiment might not resonate on this board, but it's worth thinking about in between bouts of politics.

Here are extracts from a very interesting blog post by George Mobus, an associate professor in the Institute of Technology the University of Washington in Tacoma. One of his research interests is "Biophysical Economics".

The Dynamics of an Abstract Economic System


The three colored regions between net energy and assets represent three distinct phases in economic activities. The green region, labeled ‘debt payback feasible’ represents a phase in which net energy is growing faster than production can add to the asset base by the above equation. During this time it is easy to imagine how expectations that future periods will always have a capacity for growth in asset production arise and lead to the institutionalization of debt financing. From the perspective of agents making decisions about how and when to create new asset wealth, the fact that there will be more such wealth in the future can be taken for granted. Debts can presumably be paid back with interest. The form of modern capitalism relies on such an assumption.

The yellow region represents a phase in which net energy is decelerating and converging with still growing asset accumulation. This convergence and ultimate cross-over is a period in which the potential to pay back loans, based on future work, is coming to an end. Once net energy is no longer in exponential growth, the expansion of assets also goes into deceleration. Agents within this phase may or may not recognize the problems associated with decelerating work capacity. One might speculate that such agents, having been so successful at using debt-based financing for wealth production in the past (green phase) would be tempted to elaborate more abstract debt instruments in an attempt to continue at least the appearance of wealth production growth. Various forms of financial bubbles might appear followed by collapse since it would become progressively harder to create real physical wealth (assets) due to decreasing available net energy. For agents that sensed a change in the general milieu there was incentive to change the organization of work processes in order to reduce costs — ultimately energy costs of production — such as moving manufacturing to regions of cheaper labor. The yellow region represents a period of adaptation, where possible, to decelerating net energy flow.

Eventually, however, once net energy production falls below the asset accumulation curve, the capacity for paying back debt-based obligations is no longer. Indeed, in the red region it is not even possible to create legitimate debt instruments since all net energy production should be now going strictly to maintenance work. No new assets can be created without ignoring the maintenance of current assets (and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the most powerful agents) and all work is geared toward fighting entropy and struggles to supply consumption processes (one imagines this to be chiefly oriented toward maintaining food production).

The vertical line marked ‘today’ is an arbitrarily placed marker for peak oil, presumed to have already happened (reports on various energy web sites strongly suggest this). If this is the case, then we are already into the red region where it is impossible to create debt-based financing (legitimately) since there is absolutely no possibility of paying off that debt with future work resulting in greater asset accumulation. Is it possible that this is exactly the problem we are seeing in our heavily debt reliant economy today? Our financial systems have clearly gotten out of sync with our real asset producing economy. We are in the throes of debt-unwind and very possibly massive defaults as nations, corporations, and individuals (who have no jobs) are incapable of promising to work more in the future to pay back their obligations. Those who would loan money (claims on assets) to those who propose to create new wealth would do well to reconsider since the model suggests that it will be impossible to even get back the principal, let alone the interest.

My takeaway is that we are seeing the initial economic wobbles triggered by an inevitable and irreversible decline in the net energy of oil. We're still in the early stages of this, but because the decline is just going to get worse from here on, the recession we're in is unlikely to end. Ever. No matter who we punish.

Blaming Republicans and bankers is very good sport - and god knows they've got a lot to answer for - but don't be surprised if fixing their wagon doesn't fix our problem.

[LetTimmySmoke]

49. Because the outsourcing/offshoring hasn't stopped

That's the underlying cause of our malaise, and it hasn't been fixed.

[sloughtermark]

50. What recovery?

What recovery? I seriously doubt that we ever had a real
recovery. I'm pretty sure it's propoganda to cover up how bad
things really are.

[piratefish08]

51. banks took bailout money, paid themselves bonuses, put zero back into the economy.

you know what though?

i don't even blame them anymore.

our leaders allow them to go unpunished, they run the same scams again and THEN the WH promotes the fuckers to positions of power in DC.

the game is rigged, the winners knew who they were before we even knew about the game.........

[DCBob]

52. Dying? No.. more like a short term downturn on the extremely difficult road to recovery.

There have been a number of significant things that have happened recently which may have congealed to caused this.. high oil prices, concerns about Greece, concerns about the debt ceiling, Japan crisis, and very extreme weather events. I think the economy could have handled any one or two of those at the same time but not all five.

[truedelphi]

53. Collusionary forces of the One Big Money Party?

What is one of the first things that the Democratic majority did to small businesses in Spring 2007?

Under Nancy Pelosi's urging!?!

Raise the postal rates on small businesses while lowering them on one of the Big Campaign Contributors (Time/Warner or whomever.)

The middle class is being shat on right and democratic left.

If you think we will be saved by the DLC, you are mistaken.

[sloughtermark]

55. Why should they?

Why should they be loud and clear? It might interfer with
their cash flow. It's the way the Republicans prefer it. The
rich get richer, the poor get poorer, "middle class"
becomes an archaic term.....