Bush commends America's high unemployment rate
 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites), brushing aside criticism from Democrats, called the nation's 5.6 percent unemployment rate on Monday "a good number" given recent shocks to the economy.

"The 5.6 percent unemployment (rate) is a good national number. It's not good enough, but it's a good number, particularly since what we've been through, which has been a recession and emergency and corporate scandal and war," the president told U.S. governors at a White House meeting.

Unemployment has emerged as a hot-button issue in this year's presidential campaign. Nearly 2.8 million factory jobs have been lost since Bush took office and Democrats say the Republican White House has been insensitive to their plight.


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...nm/20040223...

actually, 5.6% is a good number.
You would never want it lower than 4%.

how's Blockbuster?

Bullshit. It was down to 3.5% in Utah and almost any motherfucker would hire any warm body and pay more than they usually would. I'd take that over this shit any day.

Thanks for proving my point. Paying more for labour than you should causes an increase in prices known as inflation. It's something call the Phillips curve. Here's a graph to help.
http://webpages.acs.ttu.edu/falam/images/effect3.jpg

Fuck that college boy.

haha! i love economics, it's so quaint.

This just made my day great. Seeing a phillips curve on this site is like finding a beatles butcher album in a stack of 5 cent records.

thank you good sir.

did it really take some guy named Phillips to figure out how to plot a 1/x relation?

for unemployment and inflation, yes.

look, I know I said I liked you in another thread, but that doesn't mean I am a deity.

Who cares about inflation being higher when you're getting paid more? And anyway, don't higher wages mean more disposable income going back into consumption?

Wow, I'm a bit surprised you don't know more about the balance of inflation and unemployment and the problems an unbalance creates.

Those higher wages you're speaking of actually buy less when their buying power is rendered impotent by above average inflation. During Clinton's last year of office, inflation shot up to 4%, and as William Safire mentioned in a recent column, those higher prices sent real average weekly wages down by half a percent for the first time in years. It doesn't matter if you're making more money under high inflation. Your dollar is worth just as little had you not even gotten the raise.

What good is a 20% raise if your dollar is now worth 80 cents?

speaking of that, its amazing to think that the minimum wage had so much more buying power 25-40 years ago than it does today. and, as i believe i've said before, even though Wesley Clark is now out of the presidential race(the best candidate, BY FAR), one of the reasons i supported him was because he was planning to raise the minimum wage to $7, which was even higher than some of the other candidates were proposing to raise the minimum wage up to.

anyway, even though yes, 5.6 isn't bad for an unemployment figure, i still hope Kerry or Edwards(whoever wins the nomination) exposes and goes after Dubya for his horrible handling of the economy over the last 4 years. that chimp needs to get out of office right away and take the next flight out to Texas.

I assumed lee was joking....hmmmmmmm

its got to do with the costs associated with inflation. overall costs to society. as well as the stickiness in wages. basically, people can change the price on a gallon of milk to keep up with rising prices a lot faster than they can increase their wages. particularly since many wages are based on contracts negotiated beforehand. for many people, wages are locked in the short term, whereas prices arent.

other costs are so called 'menu costs'. the term comes from the example in which a resturaunt has to print up new menus when there's inflation, to reflect the new prices. obviously, it applies to more than just menus.

and further, inflation adds an element of uncertainty/instability that investors would rather do without. with another dimension of change (prices), there's more uncertainty. prices are changing by this much, how much will they change by tomorrow? wht does this mean about rates? investment opportunities? that uncertainty can scare off people who would otherwise invest, and that can have negative impacts on economic growth.

goign along with that, you can see that a steady, constant, low rate of inflation is better than accellerating inflation...


but the 4% inflation rate quoted isn't a hard and fast, absolute law. there's debate over where the ideal rate is, and it has changed over time. its definitely in the range, but to use words like never implies more certainty than economics really offers.

yay kids, yay!

edit: even ignoring the costs associated with inflation, and assuming that wages weren't so sticky (both bad assumptions), inflation wouldn't matter only if wages increased by exactly as much as inflation.

but only as good as a third state butcher.

this is the first i've heard of any of this stuff since i dropped out of college 4 classes away from getting an economics degree at UNC. on netphoria.... ha

If you think raising the minimum wage is going to create more buying power then you need to read a few books on economics. Just think what would happen if the minimum wage was raised to $100 an hour. Do you think that that $100 would be worth the same that a hundred dollars is worth right now? Do you think that everyoen elses wages would go up at a parellel percent to the increase in minimum wage?

THE DOLLAR HAS NO INTRINSIC VALUE!

Rasing minimum wage hurts the poor and middle class and is absolutely destructive to the economy.

I'll help paraphrase:

The cost of a Lexus will remain the same. The cost of milk and eggs and cheese and bread will go way up.

and it does. Oregon's minimum wage is now linked to the CPI and it is screwing us over big time (just like washington). My wages have to go up by 4% every year just to STAY EVEN. Fast food, groceries, and the cheap items that I buy all went up by about 5% when the wage was increased to $7.15 this January. The money from minimum wage doesn't come from nowhere people.

that was a beautiful time. 11.50/hr for a receptionist job.

Does the cpi in the usa take in house prices as well as the noirmal stuff ? i know in ireland it doesnt and is giving incorrect perception of the true level of inflation

That's a local level in a backwater state. On a national level it would be disastrous.