Obama the socialist

[admin]

Here's The Difference In Government Employment Between Obama And Five Past Presidents

• JOE WEISENTHAL

• JUN. 8, 2014, 6:30 AM
• http://static2.businessinsider.com/asset...1402074334); background-position: -300px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat;" title="views">17,835

On Friday, the US economy hit a significant milestone. The total number of Non-Farm Payrolls has finally surpassed the pre-crisis peak from early 2008.

That's a depressing milestone though. For one thing, it's taken way too long to get here. And for another thing, we're still not caught up, because the population has grown since then, so just being back at that level isn't enough.

So what's held the job market back? One huge factor has been government employment.

Bill McBride at Calculated Risk has updated his chart of public sector employment under Obama and the last few Presidents. As you can see, it's not even close. The public sector (mostly concentrated at the state and local levels) has aggressively shed jobs during the Obama administration. That's a trend that never happened under recent Presidents.

Calculated Risk

There's no getting around how much of a drag this has been.

As for private sector employment growth?

Well, the Obama administration is right in the middle of the pack.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/government-employment-obama-vs-past-presidents-2014-6#ixzz3442InRjR

[ArtM72]

Facts don't matter, but that doesn't keep them from being interesting. Thanks for the post.

[admin]

Facts don't matter, but that doesn't keep them from being interesting. Thanks for the post.

To be fair, most of the job retrenchment was at the state and local level, which has little to do with Obama (although at least employment wise, there hasn't been the big build-out of the state, not even at the Federal level),

However, looking at the second figure, I knew that private sector job creation was very good under Clinton, but under Carter?! That's new to me, to be honest. It's amazing if you compare widely held perceptions with the simple facts at times.

One could say it was too good, contributing to the inflation which was then killed by Volcker in the early 1980s with 20% interest rates, but still, the gap between perception and reality seems rather large to me here.

[ArtM72]

Facts don't matter, but that doesn't keep them from being interesting. Thanks for the post.

To be fair, most of the job retrenchment was at the state and local level, which has little to do with Obama (although at least employment wise, there hasn't been the big build-out of the state, not even at the Federal level),

Good point(s).  The state and local job losses occurred as a result in huge revenue losses due to the recession which included, in part, loss of federal program monies but mostly such things as losses in sales tax revenues, income tax revenues, increased social welfare costs (e.g. unemployment comp), the need to balance local budgets and a general unwillingness to return to previous staffing levels.

A good non-partisan view would be that this recovery, albeit slow, is a reflection of the resiliency of the US economy (so long as the Fed's monetary policies gets an all-important nod).

[admin]

Yes, although the case for using fiscal, rather than monetary policy post 2008 is very compelling IMHO, although one could say that the $9 trillion wiped of household balance sheets as a result of the housing crash required both. There can be little doubt though that under these circumstances, fiscal policy would have been much more effective, instead we got mild headwinds from fiscal policy and monetary policy had to do all the heavy lifting

[admin]

A new study concludes that under Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve’s extraordinary measures to fight the financial crisis cut the unemployment rate by about 1 percentage point from what it would otherwise have been.

Study: Bernanke's Fed Lowered the Jobless Rate by One Percentage Point - Businessweek

To butress the earlier point about relative effectiveness of monetary versus fiscal policy when households are delevering and interest rates are already zero. It's not a surprise, most study find a modest positive effect. It helps a bit, it helps people afloat with large debt burdens, but fiscal policy would have been much more effective as the multiplier is especially large under these circumstances, as several studies (IMF, Summers and DeLong) have shown.

We could also have targeted fiscal policy much better. Rather than pump so much money into financial markets, we could have fixed a lot of infrastructure..