This week saw the first presidential debate. The main topic was the economy, but we heard more about Big Bird than jobs or the foreclosure crisis. Also missing: President Obama, who was more present on stage with Eastwood in Tampa than with Romney in Denver. It wasn't a bad metaphor for the last three years: one side lying about tax cuts and deficits, the other defensive and unwilling to fight for its own job-creating policies. The election narrative shifted again on Friday when the latest jobs report showed a drop in unemployment to 7.8 percent. Republicans screamed fraud, with no basis in reality. But lest we pop the champagne too soon, remember that at the present rate of 114,000 jobs added a month, it would take over a decade to reach full employment. A celebration based on such meager numbers underscores just how badly we need a real debate on the economy.
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Burnett explained closing deductions is what solves the amount of revenue lost by the lowering of tax rates.
"Well, okay, stipulated. It won't be near $5 trillion but it's also not going to be the sum of $5 trillion in the loopholes that he's going to close," Cutter responded.
Cutter eventually acknowledged that the closing of deductions accounts for at least four trillion of the five trillion in lost revenues she claims that will not be collected in taxes.
realclearpolitics.com
It's funny, because if this administration did anything to help the economy it would be bragging about it night and day right now.
To say the claims of fraud have no basis in reality is just as biased as those who claim the numbers are skewed by insiders trying to affect the elction.
The idea that Dems are celebrating the unemployment returning to the same number it was 45 months when Obama took office is the same as a Wide Receiver spiking the ball in the end zone while taunting the crowd with his team down 45-7 in the 4th Qtr. - Get Real!
At this rate of 114,000 jobs created, it would take us until the year 2025 to recover the jobs the jobs lost during the past 5 years.
Not to mention that when you consider there are a little over 100 million working age adults in the country, yet we have 23 million un & underployed - so if you believe the unemployment rate is only 7% or 8% then you're fooling yourself anyway.
The BIg Bird comment is just a small sample of what will happen to Mr. Romney when (IF) he gives more specifics of his economic and tax plans. He has refused to give any details of his ideas.
conservatives are the masters of fake crises
It is a shame that the numbers and statements only come to light when we with open minds want to look at them . So the truth will set us free to understand where we really are in HISTORY!
WAG THE TAIL OF THE DOG AS GONE ON TO LONG?
Brilliant writing Arianna!
We do recognize how difficult it must be to lead this great Nation and simultaneously prepare for and then debate with a such a slick shameless dissembler who will say absolutely anything to further his ambition.
However, because of the utmost necessity of preventing that character from ascending to the Presidency, we are confident that at the next debate, the President will be truly in the passionate present and refrain from looking down at his notes obsessively. And we hope he can eliminate that awkward momentary professorial pause before he responds to every question.
All our lives and liberties depend on it!
party before country: the conservative mantra
How can we have a "real debate" under the auspices of the Commission on Presidential Debates? This little travesty is naught but a creation of the combined Democrat and Republican Parties (the Republocrats), subsidized largely by 6 corporate underwriters, and gracing “We the 99%” with the media blue smoke and mirrors of a format, questions, content, and oversight designed in secret by this “Commission”, in reality the 1%.
When I was still middle aged, in the early 1980’s, and before, we had real debates presented independent of either Party or their corporate owners by the League of Women Voters. Between 1984 and 1988, smarting by the inclusion of John Anderson in 1980 debate over the objection of Jimmy Carter, and the refusal by the LOWV to knuckle under to rules secretly composed by the campaigns of George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis in 1984, the LOWV withdrew rather than perpetrate a fraud on the American people. In 1987, leaders of the newly formed Commission, Frank Fahrenkopf of the RNC and Paul G. Kirk of the DNC, made it clear that every effort would be exerted to exclude third party candidates.
Coincident with the “Debacle from Denver”, Democracy Now aired a simulcast from Littleton, CO, with Rocky Anderson and Dr. Jill Stein following Rombama as “they” answered each question.
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/10/4/expanding_the_debate_watch_democracy_nows_full_three_hour_special
What might help is raising the tariffs so companies going overseas for cheaper help won't be able to sell products in the USA cheaper than companies making stuff and selling it here. That would certainly help the job situation.
Say good bye to free trade, where our big economy has the advantage.!
General Electric has handed over aviation avionics technology to the state-owned Aviation Industry Corp. of China.
Westinghouse Electric has provided some 75,000 documents in an initial technology transfer to gain a share in China's burgeoning nuclear power market.
And Ford Motor Co. is ready to share proprietary technologies for electric vehicles in exchange for selling cars in China.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/free-trade-us-unemployment_b_945805.html?ir=World
Most free traders are so religiously committed to the doctrine that they can't even imagine the possibility that they might be wrong. Trade isn't a zero-sum game, but it certainly has winners and losers.
America right now is being inexorably stripped of its most valuable industries by its naïve embrace of one-sided free trade. Here's the Harvard Business Review's list of industries we have already lost:
Fabless chips; compact fluorescent lighting; LCDs for monitors, TVs and handheld devices like mobile phones; electrophoretic displays; lithium ion, lithium polymer and NiMH batteries; advanced rechargeable batteries for hybrid vehicles; crystalline and polycrystalline silicon solar cells, inverters and power semiconductors for solar panels; desktop, notebook and netbook PCs; low-end servers; hard-disk drives; consumer networking gear such as routers, access points, and home set-top boxes; advanced composite used in sporting goods and other consumer gear; advanced ceramics and integrated circuit packaging.