Michigan is in a one state recession. sm

• Unemployment numbers - historian
  • Michigan is in a one state recession. sm - MT and worn out
  • You cant thank the democratic congress too. - I am sure O will solve it all. LOL.nm
    • Denial like this will land you in the same place - in 2010 and 2012...sm
      • my paper said highest number in 14 years - who was in charge then? - nm
      • Yes...I will look again at that - Kendra
    • he is not in charge right now ....looks like it is up to us to help each other - historian
      • Food pantries are running out of food, charity - Backwards typist
        • Exactly...but Obama is still pushing his Global Poverty Bill..... - MT and worn out
      • Good point. We give money because we want to. - Should not be forced to. -socialism.nm
        • It is not socialism to get us off W's path to desctruction - and back on course...sm

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With the "bubble bursting" in regards to the housing market and rising fuel prices, do you think a major recession is on the horizon in the US?

I definitely think so, but was wondering what others think?

    When the labor market weakens, workers have less bargaining power with their employers. As a result, wages are trailing more than 2 percentage points behind inflation over the last year.

    Wages are virtually the entire income for most workers. If the purchasing power of their wages falls by 2 percent, this is the equivalent of a 2 percentage point increase in their tax rate.

    This is worth thinking about. Most workers in the country have just seen the equivalent of a 2 percentage point increase in their tax rate, and it has gotten almost no attention. By contrast, Senator McCain is claiming that the economy will collapse if we increase the tax rate by 3.6 percentage points for people who can't remember how many homes they own.

    It is easy to understand how a typical family experiences real hardship when their wages don't keep up with the price of food, gas, and heating oil. It's a bit harder to understand how the folks who can't keep track of their homes will suffer by restoring tax rates to the Clinton-era levels.

    This brings us to the other important point about the Friday jobs numbers. The economy is in bad shape and getting worse. This disaster is happening while we are experimenting with the tax policies advocated by Senator McCain. We have an economy that is now shedding jobs at the rate of almost 100,000 a month. There is no prospect of turnaround in sight. We could have half a million fewer jobs by the time the next president is sworn into office than we do today.

    This is the Bush-McCain economy. Senator McCain may have forgotten, but President Bush already tried his economic policies and the results are not good. We have just been through a business cycle in which the wage of the typical worker and the typical working family fell. This is the first time that has ever happened.

    As bad as the situation is, it will surely get worse as the recession deepens. Wages and incomes will fall further behind inflation as the unemployment rate continues to rise. By contrast, the Clinton-era tax rates were associated with the most prosperous period since the early seventies.

    As I have written many times, Clinton's policies do not deserve all the credit for the prosperity of the late 90s, and President Bush's polices do not deserve all the blame for the economy's poor performance in the current decade.

    However, it strains credulity to argue that the Clinton-era tax rates are a recipe for stagnation, while the Bush-McCain tax cuts for the rich are the road to prosperity. When he pushes his tax cuts as a remedy for the economy's ills, Senator McCain is effectively imitating Groucho Marx's famous line: "what are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

    At this point, McCain should be embarrassed to even say that tax cuts for the rich help the economy. Tax cuts for the rich help the rich, they don't help the economy. It's that simple.

    This economic catastrophe was many years in the making. There is no painless way to recover from the collapse of the housing bubble and the correction from an over-valued dollar. We do know that Senator McCain's plan to keep giving the rich more money is not a road to prosperity because that is exactly what we have been doing.

    We can't know exactly how Senator Obama will address the economy's problems if he takes office in January in part because we don't know exactly where the economy will be. However, a plan that focuses on supporting ordinary workers and promoting clean technologies, is likely to produce much better results than policies that are focused on redistributing even more income to the wealthy.

http://www.truthout.org/article/the-whiners-recession

has anything to do with it?  Hey, that's what republicans want, big business to grow fast--no regulation--me, me, me...

How about all those families that are going to suffer from this.  Did they ask for it too?

was coming long before the "experts" knew it.  All they had to do was to be Americans who were trying to fill up their gas tanks, feed their families and try to hang on to their jobs.  I just read an article the other day where someone in the government finally admitted that we've been in a recession that they believe will last another 14 months.  (Can't remember who said it; will try to find the link.)  This is after months and months of denials, although most everday folks felt like they were in a recession long before hearing it "officially."

If they are only now admitting to a recession, that tells me that we're in the beginnings of a full-fledged DEPRESSION. 

Add terror threats, a war between Iran and Israel and the USA, perhaps provoking a terror attack (real or "false flag"), people becoming so poor in this country that their fear is replaced with anger, and voila!!  The US soldiers that are lying in wait for us to "misbehave" as tensions arise so they can keep us in line, just might have their work cut out for them...especially if we suffer another attack on our soil.

We've got crooks running the Treasury Department, all chosen from the same failing companies for which they worked. 

The Wall Street "crisis" came on so quickly and so urgently that nobody knew what to do.

Well, Bush knew what to do.  First, he hired Henry Paulson of Goldman Sachs fame, the company that received a $3 billion payout, who then went on to appoint Michael Alix to "oversee things."  This is the same Michael Alix who was in control of "overseeing things" at Bear Stearns (we remember how well that whole Bear Stearns thing worked out.)  Paulson then went on to appoint Neel Kashkari (another Goldman Sachs graduate).

Bush has selected these men, either personally or through Paulson, because he knows that THEY know how to play the system and accentuate the greed.  He hired people who aren't on America's side at all.  They're part of Bush's "Haves," and the rest of average Americans -- the "have nots" -- aren't even in the picture, except as it pertains to how much money has been stolen from our accounts.  Bush has always has been about greed.  He still is.  When a government begins to buy banks, it's at the very least socialism (if not, more accurately, fascism).  For all intents and purposes, this money could easily be in Bush's pockets.  We don't and won't know this because this particular sweetheart deal came with NO oversight and NO transparency as conditions on the part of Bush.  By the way, Bush bought a ranch in Paraguay. 

Basically, Bush had a lot of knowledgeable, independent people who had NO conflict of interest from having been senior executives of the failed companies from which he could have chosen.

Instead, he chose those who were at the very top to the crooks (if not the crooks themselves.)

In short, Bush hired the foxes to watch the hen houses.  No doubt in my mind that Bush's pockets are going to be pretty full soon if they're not already.

The arrogance with which these auto executives presented their testimony is reminiscent of all the arrogant people who surround themselves with the Arrogant-In-Chief.

In the middle of all this, though, I do see somewhat of a silver lining.  The less money people have to spend, the lower prices will be forced to go -- all that supply and demand stuff. 

Enter Obama's "bottom-up" theory.  Once the lives of the least of us can improve a bit, that will hopefully trickle up to everyone else.

I also heard an excellent idea on TV recently:  That every single CEO of a company should NEVER earn more than the President of the United States.  I kind of liked that one. 

P.S.  I apologize if this post doesn't make any sense.  I'm very heavily medicated right now and probably shouldn't even be at the computer.  I've tried to write this as coherently as I could.  If I failed, I apologize. 

Hope you all have a great evening.

I keep hearing about HC wanting to push on getting Florida and Michigan votes to count, delegates to be seated, etc.  While I understand about every vote should count and they should, I also understand that Fla & Mich agreed on this so that they could vote early (i.e. they broke the rules and were punished) and both sides (Obama & Clinton) agreed to it.  I guess at that time she thought that the whole US was just going to vote for her and nobody would vote for Obama and now that she is seeing otherwise she wants to change the rules/laws.

Now I don't even understand why there is a meeting going on.  Doesn't anyone just tell them...No!  You agreed to this.  You were told of the consequences and you agreed and now that your losing you want to change the laws to be put in your favor.  Every time they don't win they want to change the rules, and I dont understand why they are not just being told "No".  If they are so concerned about all the votes counting why didn't they just wait until when they were supposed to vote and not push it earlier.  I can tell you - because they thought they would be winning more states and they didn't care enough about Fla or Mich to wait.

Now I understand that she is going to go to the meeting and push that even with FL and MI she doesn't have enough votes, but she's now going to push for them to just dismiss Obama (even though he has more delagates and votes, and states won), that they should just dump him and make her the nominee because she believes she can win over McCain. She really needs to wake up.  She's just like her husband - a legend in their own minds.  If she steals this from Obama and becomes the nominee (which I doubt very very much) but if she was to be able to finagle that so much dirt would come out going all the way back to Whitewater, Rose Law Firm, etc, etc,

Maybe what they should be doing is taking responsibility and telling the citizens of FL & MI the real reason why their votes are not being counted - because of her and her decisions she made and if they blame anyone they should blame her for not following the laws.

And on another side cannot anyone tell me why in the world Obama's name was not on the ticket in MI.  I have not for the life of me figured out that one.  Only her name was on the ticket?  Helloooo....the last time I looked there were two candidates.  Now they are trying to say Obama removed his name from the ticket.  Yeah, right, tell me another one.  I hear that and I think, what country do we live in where the person who wants to be president has only their name on the ballot.  That's what I hear happens in Cuba, Russia and all those other communist countries.

When wil the insanity end?

have a father that retired from General Motors and have a lot of friends that have either retired from there or currently work there, it is a big combination of blame.  I blame the union, General Motors and the employees for letting a lot of this happen.  GM paid the "fat cats" (that is what they are called around here) big money for skilled trades for them to sit around and do nothing, literally nothing.  It is a big joke around here that some go and clock in and turn around and go straight to a bar and then go back to clock out.  If they are needed, someone will call their cell and let them know they are needed. 

It has been common for years to allow employees to work 70/80 hour weeks, massive overtime and my father was one of them.  He was making over $130k a year, if not more when he retired.  I know it was hard physically on him to do it, but he said that he mostly read on the job and exercised.  A friend's husband goes to work to sleep.

I am not saying that everyone does this, but a majority of them do and it is a real shame.  I know the ones on the lines cannot do it, but the skilled trades can and do.  If the salaried employees complain, then the union gets involved and they still get to keep their jobs no matter how many times they are written up.  It takes a lot to get an employee fired. 

Just think, something breaks on the line, so they call in the skilled trades guy who has been at the bar drinking, he comes and fixes whatever is wrong, creating a quality problem and then GM has to charge so much money to cover the expenses.  And we wonder why they are over priced? And they want to be bailed out?  No thank you!

The GM execs have been getting millions of dollars in bonuses for years as well and the employees get a nice check before Xmas as well for a bonus.  They should have been like any other company and budgeted their money.  Shame on them.  If they had quality vehicles at a reasonable price, people wouldn't be buying foreign cars.  I personally do drive a GM vehicle because of the discount that I get from my dad.  Otherwise, I would probably be buying foreign as well, you get what you pay for. 

Sorry to rant, but living in a GM town and not working there, you can get a different perspective on things than what is shown in the news/media.  Forgive me if I have offended anyone.

With Recession Looming, Bush Tells America To ‘Go Shopping More’

Today, President Bush held a news conference where he discussed the “way forward” for the economy in 2007. Renowned Morgan Stanley economist Steven Roach says the the “odds of the U.S. economy tipping into recession are about 40 to 45 per cent.” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman notes that “the odds are very good — maybe 2 to 1,” that the U.S. will teeter toward a recession in 2007. Bush’s solution? “Go shopping more.”

This isn't terribly reassuring!

Government website now offers 'suicide warning signs' for victims of recession

John Byrne
Published: Tuesday March 31, 2009

When the government starts warning you not to commit suicide, you know things have gotten bad.

The US Department of Health and Human Services now has a webpage for the current recession, "Getting Through Tough Economic Times." Headlined under the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (www.samhsa.gov/economy/), the guide offers tips on "how to deal with the effects financial difficulties can have on your physical and mental health." The site went public Tuesday.

The remainder of the story is at:  http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Government_website_offers_suicide_warning_signs_0331.html

Many people were confined against their will just because someone wanted them "out of the way." These were normal people with no mental illness - that is why it is so difficult - don't blame the liberals. Blame your state.

CONFINING THE MENTALLY ILL


In the legal space between what a society should and should not do, taking action to restrict the liberty of people who are mentally ill sits in the grayest of gray areas.

Our notions about civil and constitutional rights flow from an assumption of "normalcy." Step beyond the boundaries and arrest and prison may legally follow. Short of that, government's ability to hold people against their will is severely and properly limited. Unusual behavior on the part of someone who is mentally ill is not illegal behavior. Freedom can't be snatched away on a whim, or on the thought that a person is hard to look at, hard to hear, hard to smell.

It was only a few decades ago that the promise of new medications and a change in attitude opened the doors of the mental hospitals and sent many patients into society. There, they would somehow "normalize" and join everyone else, supported by networks of out-patient facilities, job training, special living arrangements and regular, appropriate medication. But the transition has been imperfect, long and difficult.

In some parts of urban America there is little professional support for those with mental health problems. A new generation of drug and alcohol-fueled mental illness has come on the scene. People frequently end up on the street, un-medicated and exhibiting a full range of behaviors that are discomforting at the very least and threatening at their worst.

(AP / CBS) Quote This antiquated law allows the state to unconstitutionally interfere with a parent's relationship with his or her children. Kary Moss, executive director, ACLU of Michigan

So, this "man of the people" who funds the loony left and wants all the rest of us to be communists rakes in $billions from the recession.  He's out there picking up stuff at bargain-basement prices just like JP Morgan and his kind did.

Disgusting.

homes, natural disasters unattended to, collapsing bridges, earmark bridges. Address those first, save flag for later.

Unemployment rate soars to 8.1 percent
Employers resort to even bigger layoffs as they scramble to survive
BREAKING NEWS
The Associated Press
updated 8:02 a.m. CT, Fri., March. 6, 2009

WASHINGTON - The nation's unemployment rate bolted to 8.1 percent in February, the highest since late 1983, as cost-cutting employers slashed 651,000 jobs.

Both figures were worse than analysts expected and the Labor Department's report shows America's workers being clobbered by a relentless wave of layoffs.

The net loss of jobs in February came after even deeper payroll reductions in the prior two months, according to revised figures. The economy lost 681,000 jobs in December and another 655,000 in January.

Since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has lost 4.4 million jobs, more than half of which occurred in the past four months.

Employers are shrinking their work forces at alarming clip and are turning to other ways to slash costs — including trimming workers' hours, freezing wages or cutting pay — because the recession has eaten into their sales and profits. Customers at home and abroad are cutting back as other countries cope with their own economic problems.

With employers showing no appetite to hire, the unemployment jumped to 8.1 percent from 7.6 percent in January. That was the highest since December 1983, when the jobless rate was 8.3 percent.

All told, the number of unemployed people climbed to 12.5 million. In addition, the number of people forced to work part time for "economic reasons" rose by a sharp 787,000 to 8.6 million. That's people who would like to work full time but whose hours were cut back or were unable to find full-time work.

Meanwhile, the average work week in February stayed at 33.3 hours, matching the record low set in December.

Job losses were widespread in February.

Construction companies eliminated 104,000 jobs. Factories axed 168,000. Retailers cut nearly 40,000. Professional and business services got rid of 180,000, with 78,000 jobs lost at temporary-help agencies. Financial companies reduced payrolls by 44,000. Leisure and hospitality firms chopped 33,000 positions.

The few areas spared: education and health services, as well as government, which boosted employment last month.

A new wave of layoffs hit this week.

General Dynamics Corp. said Thursday it will lay off 1,200 workers due partly to plummeting sales of business and personal jets that forced it to cut production. Defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp., and Tyco Electronics Ltd., which makes electronic components, undersea telecommunications systems and wireless equipment, also are trimming payrolls.

"This is basically cleaning house for a lot of firms," said John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia. "They are using the first quarter to cut back employment and figure out what they want."

Disappearing jobs and evaporating wealth from tanking home values, 401(k)s and other investments have forced consumers to retrench, driving companies to lay off workers. It's a vicious cycle in which all the economy's negative problems feed on each other, worsening the downward spiral.

"The economy is in a tailspin. Businesses are jettisoning jobs at an unprecedented pace," said Richard Yamarone, economist at Argus Research.

The country is getting bloodied by fallout from the housing, credit and financial crises_ the worst since the 1930s. And there's no easy fix for a quick turnaround, economists said.

President Barack Obama is counting on a multipronged assault to lift the country out of recession: a $787 billion stimulus package of increased federal spending and tax cuts; a revamped, multibillion-dollar bailout program for the nation's troubled banks; and a $75 billion effort to stem home foreclosures.

Even in the best-case scenario that the relief efforts work and the recession ends later in 2009, the unemployment rate is expected to keep climbing, hitting 9 percent or higher this year. In fact, the Federal Reserve thinks the unemployment rate will stay elevated into 2011. Economists say the job market may not get back to normal — meaning a 5 percent unemployment rate — until 2013.

Businesses won't be inclined to ramp up hiring until they are sure any economic recovery has staying power.

The economy contracted at a staggering 6.2 percent in the final three months of 2008, the worst showing in a quarter-century, and it will probably continue to shrink during the first six months of this year.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress earlier this week that recent economic barometers "show little sign of improvement" and suggest that "labor market conditions may have worsened further in recent weeks."

Consumers’ growing frugality has hammered automakers, among other industries. General Motors Corp.'s auditors on Thursday raised "substantial doubt" about the auto giant’s ability to continue operations, and the company said it might have to seek bankruptcy protection, sending its shares below $2.

Bill Hampel, chief economist for the Credit Union National Association, said his group’s members are reporting record increases in deposits. Government figures show the savings rate jumped to 5 percent in January from zero last spring. That’s the highest rate since 1995 and a much faster shift than he had expected, Hampel said.

Consumer spending makes up about 70 percent of the economy. It topped out at 71 percent in 2005, Hampel said, but will likely drop by 2 to 3 percentage points over the next few years.

Increased savings can actually lower economic growth. Economists call it the “paradox of thrift”: What’s good for each of us individually — being thrifty, limiting our spending — can worsen a recession when everyone does it all at once.

Hoffman said about half the 6.2 percent drop in economic output last quarter was attributable to lower consumer spending.

Written last Thanksgiving:  "Some would argue that two different nations actually celebrated: upright, moral, traditional red America and the dissolute, liberal blue states clustered on the periphery of the heartland. The truth, however, is much more complicated and interesting than that.

Take two iconic states: Texas and Massachusetts. In some ways, they were the two states competing in the last election. In the world's imagination, you couldn't have two starker opposites. One is the homeplace of Harvard, gay marriage, high taxes, and social permissiveness. The other is Bush country, solidly Republican, traditional, and gun-toting. Massachusetts voted for Kerry over Bush 62 to 37 percent; Texas voted for Bush over Kerry 61 to 38 percent.

So ask yourself a simple question: which state has the highest divorce rate? Marriage was a key issue in the last election, with Massachusetts' gay marriages becoming a symbol of alleged blue state decadence and moral decay. But in actual fact, Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country at 2.4 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants. Texas - which until recently made private gay sex a criminal offence - has a divorce rate of 4.1. A fluke? Not at all. The states with the highest divorce rates in the U.S. are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. And the states with the lowest divorce rates are: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Every single one of the high divorce rate states went for Bush. Every single one of the low divorce rate states went for Kerry. The Bible Belt divorce rate, in fact, is roughly 50 percent higher than the national average.

Some of this discrepancy can be accounted for by the fact that couples tend to marry younger in the Bible Belt - and many clearly don't have the maturity to know what they're getting into. There's some correlation too between rates of college education and stable marriages, with the Bible Belt lagging a highly educated state like Massachusetts. But the irony still holds. Those parts of America that most fiercely uphold what they believe are traditional values are not those parts where traditional values are healthiest. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. A more insightful explanation is that these socially troubled communities cling onto absolutes in the abstract because they cannot live up to them in practice.

But doesn't being born again help bring down divorce rates? Jesus, after all, was mum on the subject of homosexuality, but was very clear about divorce, declaring it a sin unless adultery was involved. A recent study, however, found no measurable difference in divorce rates between those who are "born again" and those who are not. 29 percent of Baptists have been divorced, compared to 21 percent of Catholics. Moreover, a staggering 23 percent of married born-agains have been divorced twice or more. Teen births? Again, the contrast is striking. In a state like Texas, where the religious right is extremely strong and the rhetoric against teenage sex is gale-force strong, the teen births as a percentage of all births is 16.1 percent. In liberal, secular, gay-friendly Massachusetts, it's 7.4, almost half. Marriage itself is less popular in Texas than in Massachusetts. In Texas, the percent of people unmarried is 32.4 percent; in Massachusetts, it's 26.8 percent. So even with a higher marriage rate, Massachusetts manages a divorce rate almost half of its "conservative" rival.

Or take abortion. America is one of the few Western countries where the legality of abortion is still ferociously disputed. It's a country where the religious right is arguably the strongest single voting bloc, and in which abortion is a constant feature of cultural politics. Compare it to a country like Holland, perhaps the epitome of socially liberal, relativist liberalism. So which country has the highest rate of abortion? It's not even close. America has an abortion rate of 21 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44. Holland has a rate of 6.8. Americans, in other words, have three times as many abortions as the Dutch. Remind me again: which country is the most socially conservative?

Even a cursory look at the leading members of the forces of social conservatism in America reveals the same pattern. The top conservative talk-radio host, Rush Limbaugh, has had three divorces and an addiction to pain-killers. The most popular conservative television personality, Bill O'Reilly, just settled a sex harassment suit that indicated a highly active adulterous sex life. Bill Bennett, the guru of the social right, was for many years a gambling addict. Karl Rove's chief outreach manager to conservative Catholics for the last four years, Deal Hudson, also turned out to be a man with a history of sexual harassment. Bob Barr, the conservative Georgian congressman who wrote the "Defense of Marriage Act," has had three wives so far. The states which register the highest ratings for the hot new television show, "Desperate Housewives," are all Bush-states.

The complicated truth is that America truly is a divided and conflicted country. But it's a grotesque exaggeration to say that the split is geographical, or correlated with blue and red states. Many of America's biggest "sinners" are those most intent on upholding virtue. In fact, it may be partly because they know sin so close-up that they want to prevent its occurrence among others. And some of those states which have the most liberal legal climate - the Northeast and parts of the upper MidWest - are also, in practice, among the most socially conservative. To ascribe all this to "hypocrisy" seems to me too crude an explanation. America is simply a far more complicated and diverse place than crude red and blue divisions can explain.

they are adding police and only in the big cities do they have paid firemen. The rest are volunteers.

I look at it this way: If a state can't stay in the black, then they have to cut spending some place that wouldn't jeopardize the safety of the citizens. Threats of cutting essential services like Barney Fife stated today are unjustified. Cut the non-essential services first.

Our governor talks about cutting back on services, laying off government workers, which I think is a good idea because government is too big anyway, but then he turns around and spends more money on non-essential items. Doesn't make sense.  

So very very sad.

 http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0704-04.htm

go off on your own fantasy with nothing to support it!!!  DailyKos is merely a website where people go to express liberal opinions.  The AIP is a radical group that is involved with weapons.  There leader was MURDERED or he would be on the govt terrorist list.  Research, research, research.  Or else clearly label your posts "my fantasy about what ...... probably. said or did or thought  ......"