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There are signs to suggest that the brief surge in employment we've been having might have just been a fluke due in part to the warmer-than-normal winter we got.

Given that the administration was banking on the perception of a recovery, anyone want to lay odds on what Obama will do if it turns out the recovery was indeed just an illusion?

May 2, 2012 -- 4:59PM, Bodean wrote:

May 2, 2012 -- 4:16PM, Ironhold wrote:

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There are signs to suggest that the brief surge in employment we've been having might have just been a fluke due in part to the warmer-than-normal winter we got.

Given that the administration was banking on the perception of a recovery, anyone want to lay odds on what Obama will do if it turns out the recovery was indeed just an illusion?

Blame it on Bush and the GOP of course.

It's kind of passe to blame it on Bush (who was not really at fault for the housing bubble; just the unfunded wars and ruinous tax cut and drug entitlement which did not cause the crash).

But it's totally appropriate to blame the GOP and congress, whose single most important policy initiative is to make Barak Obama a one-term president.

Tenac,what did the Democrats do to cause the crash when they took over in 2007?

May 2, 2012 -- 7:04PM, drawout wrote:

Tenac,what did the Democrats do to cause the crash when they took over in 2007?

And while we are on the subject, what did Bush do to cause 52 months of job growth?

If it was the tax cut that blew a hole in the federal budget, I would submit the job creation return on investment was pretty paltry.

If by using the word "recovery" people mean "back to the way it was before y2K," that will never happen. For one thing, oil is selling for $103.62 a barrel this morning, and it's not going to go below $100 again. The price of oil effects the prices of everything we buy, because it all has to be transported.

Mostly, though, we're never going back to the good old days because so much unemployment, underemployment, and people being forced into dipshit jobs is structural -- and I don't mean that in the way "structural" is usually used. The actual architecture of the economy has been re-tooled by our "pluted bloatocrats" (Stephen King) to their advantage.

Robert Reich, Clinton's labor secretary, writes: Payrolls used to account for almost 70 percent of the typical company's costs. But one of the most striking legacies of the Great Recession has been the decline of full-time employment - as companies have substituted software or outsourced jobs abroad (courtesy of the Internet, making outsourcing more efficient than ever), or shifted them to contract workers also linked via Internet and software.

That's why most of the gains from the productivity revolution are going to the owners of capital, while typical workers are either unemployed or underemployed, or else getting wages and benefits whose real value continues to drop. The portion of total income going to capital rather than labor is the highest since the 1920s.

Increasingly, the world belongs to those collecting capital gains.

But before we start weeping and moaning about not having a future, let's look at the possibilities. The oldest cliché, "Necessity is the mother of invention," comes into play here.

Do you know how much food you can grow in your back yard? You'd be surprised.

Would it be possible to drive 75 percent less than you do now?

A part-time job pays a little money, and it's not a "career" you have to devote your life to.

Have you thought about the possibility of building networks of mutual support in your town or neighborhood? In my town there's a store that sells only locally-produced food, and the variety and quality are surprisingly top-shelf.

What I'm saying is the economy which has been deliberately shoved into the tank by the moneyed aristocrats "who float serenely over the (former) middle class like blimps made of thousand-dollar bills" (Stephen King) is presenting us with an opportunity to start living a different kind of life, and a better one.

"Living well is the best revenge," says another true cliché. It's even better than beating them up and taking their lunch money, and in the end we'll do that too.