i miss Scott Campbell

[Harlan Huckleby]

1 in 2000 working americans was laid off today. Does anyone else realize how ridiculous that is for one day? Yikes.

We are in early stage of a depression. The economists I hear are saying that the job situation won't start to improve until around 2011. And that's best case scenario - no unforseen setbacks from overseas, etc.

the real hard times will come in about a year. We've been losing 500K jobs per month the last several months, and the effects will hit when all those people start running out of savings and unemployment benefits.

This is the real shit.

[HowardRoark]

http://packerrats.com/ratchat/viewtopic.php?t=16618&start=20

[bobblehead]

1 in 2000 working americans was laid off today. Does anyone else realize how ridiculous that is for one day? Yikes.

We are in early stage of a depression. The economists I hear are saying that the job situation won't start to improve until around 2011. And that's best case scenario - no unforseen setbacks from overseas, etc.

the real hard times will come in about a year. We've been losing 500K jobs per month the last several months, and the effects will hit when all those people start running out of savings and unemployment benefits.

This is the real shit.

yes....2008 only GREW the economy by a bit over a percent...ITS THE GREAT DEPRESSION OVER AGAIN....RUN FOR THE HILLS!!!

[Fosco33]

SC-

Prop 8's passage and opposition has subsided

[Harlan Huckleby]

yes....2008 only GREW the economy by a bit over a percent...ITS THE GREAT DEPRESSION OVER AGAIN....RUN FOR THE HILLS!!!

wow. you need to get yourself a tv convertor box and catch up on the news.

Maybe the overall growth last year was merely poor, but the economy tanked last fall, and has seemingly been in a freefall since.

Last month, the GDP shrank more than at any time since 1958. The overall economy is as weak as it was in 1982 and falling. I remember how much 1982 sucked.

I've been watching Milton Freedman, conservative economist of renown, on various talk shows. He says that the stimulus package passed by congress is not only misguided, it is far too small. It won't begin to fill the hole opening in the economy. This from a fiscal conservative.

I was talking to my dad in Florida, he said small businesses there are shutting down left and right, and it is beginning to remind him of his boyhood days during depression.

Losing 500,000 jobs per month for three months, and gathering momentum.

And situation is only partially in our control by any means, a world-wide depression appears to be breaking out. Our economy has relied increasingly on exports.

I will be VERY, VERY happy if this turns out to be a deep recession that can start to turn around in a couple years. I am scared it could be much worse. You are blind if you don't see that real possibility.

[mraynrand]

Newsflash:

Newsflash:


Milton Friedman, Free Markets Theorist, Dies at 94


Published: November 16, 2006

Milton Friedman, the grandmaster of free-market economic theory in the postwar era and a prime force in the movement of nations toward less government and greater reliance on individual responsibility, died today in San Francisco, where he lived. He was 94.
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The New York Times

Milton Friedman in 1964.
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President Bush honored Milton Friedman at a ceremony in 2002.

His death was confirmed by Robert Fanger, a spokesman for the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in Indianapolis.

Conservative and liberal colleagues alike viewed Mr. Friedman, a Nobel prize laureate, as one of the 20th century’s leading economic scholars, on a par with giants like John Maynard Keynes and Paul Samuelson.

Flying the flag of economic conservatism, Mr. Friedman led the postwar challenge to the hallowed theories of Lord Keynes, the British economist who maintained that governments had a duty to help capitalistic economies through periods of recession and to prevent boom times from exploding into high inflation.

In Professor Friedman’s view, government had the opposite obligation: to keep its hands off the economy, to let the free market do its work. He was a spiritual heir to Adam Smith, the 18th-century founder of the science of economics and proponent of laissez-faire: that government governs best which governs least.

The only economic lever that Mr. Friedman would allow government to use was the one that controlled the supply of money — a monetarist view that had gone out of favor when he embraced it in the 1950s. He went on to record a signal achievement, predicting the unprecedented combination of rising unemployment and rising inflation that came to be called stagflation. His work earned him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1976.

Rarely, his colleagues said, did anyone have such impact on both his own profession and on government. Though he never served officially in the halls of power, he was always around them, as an adviser and theorist.

“Among economic scholars, Milton Friedman had no peer,” Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, said today. “The direct and indirect influences of his thinking on contemporary monetary economics would be difficult to overstate.”

Professor Friedman also fueled the rise of the Chicago School of economics, a conservative group within the department of economics at the University of Chicago. He and his colleagues became a counterforce to their liberal peers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, influencing close to a dozen American winners of the Nobel prize in economics.

It was not only Mr. Friedman’s antistatist and free-market views that held sway over his colleagues. There was also his willingness to create a place where independent thinkers could be encouraged to take unconventional stands as long as they were prepared to do battle to support them.

“Most economics departments are like country clubs,” said James J. Heckman, a Chicago faculty member and Nobel laureate who earned his doctorate at Princeton. “But at Chicago you are only as good as your last paper.”

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said of Mr. Friedman in an interview on Tuesday. “From a longer-term point of view, it’s his academic achievements which will have lasting import. But I would not dismiss the profound impact he has already had on the American public’s view.”

To Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Friedman came along at an opportune time. The Keynesian consensus among economists, he said — one that had worked well from the 1930s — could not explain the stagflation of the 1970s.

But he also said that Mr. Friedman had made a broader political argument: that you have to have economic freedom to have political freedom.

Mr. Friedman had a gift for communicating complicated ideas in simple and lucid ways, and it served him well as the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, as a columnist for Newsweek from 1966 to 1983 and even as the star of a public television series. He was a bridge between the academic and popular worlds, and his broader impact stemmed in large part from the fact that he was preaching a gospel of capitalism that fit neatly into American self-perceptions. He was pushing on an open door.

A Libertarian Champion

As a libertarian, Mr. Friedman advocated legalizing drugs and generally opposed public education and the state’s power to license doctors, automobile drivers and others. He was criticized for those views, but he stood by them, arguing that prohibiting, regulating or licensing human behavior either does not work or creates inefficient bureaucracies.

[Harlan Huckleby]

wow, that is big news.

let me see who I was thinking of.... its an equally famous guy.

[Harlan Huckleby]

Martin Feldstein

Milton Freedman, Martin Feldstein - the smart jewish guy.

I got their names confused, I remember Milton. I think Martin Feldstein is the champion conservative economist these days, or at least the media goto guy.

[mraynrand]

I thought you were talking about Harvey feldstein

[HowardRoark]

the smart jewish guy.....

A Bleak Day

By Ben Stein on 1.29.09 @ 9:31AM

I love this. The new kind of politics of hope. Eight hours of debate in the HR to pass a bill spending $820 billion, or roughly $102 billion per hour of debate.

Only ten per cent of the "stimulus" to be spent on 2009.

Close to half goes to entities that sponsor or employ or both members of the Service Employees International Union, federal, state, and municipal employee unions, or other Democrat-controlled unions.

This bill is sent to Congress after Obama has been in office for seven days. It is 680 pages long. According to my calculations, not one member of Congress read the entire bill before this vote. Obviously, it would have been impossible, given his schedule, for President Obama to have read the entire bill.

For the amount spent we could have given every unemployed person in the United States roughly $75,000.

We could give every person who had lost a job and is now passing through long-term unemployment of six months or longer roughly $300,000.

There has been pork barrel politics since there has been politics. The scale of this pork is beyond what had ever been imagined before -- and no one can be sure it will actually do much stimulation.

Further, no one can be sure that we are not already at the trough/inflection point of the recession such that this money will be spent mostly after the recovery is well under way.

How long until the debt incurred under this program is so immense that it causes a downgrade in the sovereign debt of the USA? What happens to us then?

This has been a punch in the solar plexus to the kind of responsible, far-seeing, mature government processes that are needed to protect America. This is more than the pork barrel. This is a coup for the constituencies of the party in power and against the idea of a responsible government itself. A bleak day.

Unfortunately, it is only the latest in a long series of such days stretching across decades of rule by both parties, to the point where truly responsible government is only a distant echo of our forgotten ancestors.

[swede]

R.I.P. Milton Friedman

[australianpackerbacker]

Me too..where is the guy these days?