Monday, September 1, 2008

Economic doom....DOOM! DOOOOOOOOM!!!

Recording more of my online retorts. Someone posted this as one of the problems delivered unto us by Republicans (and thus, why we should vote for Obama) --
Our craptastic job market?
What's wrong with our job market?

First thing I found on Google:
http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1014073.shtml
"Eurozone unemployment rate unchanged at 7.2% in May 2008; Irish rate rises to 6%; Spain to 9.9% - lowest in Denmark: 2.7% and the Netherlands: 2.9%"

Second thing I found on google:
http://www.nidataplus.com/lfeus1.htm

Take a look at that chart, then answer the following question:
Is our unemployment rate so bad, or is it just more liberal propaganda making you THINK it's bad? Our unemployment rate has ranged from 4.0% to 9.7% since 1980. We're at around 5.4% this year. Doom?


America isn't as bad off as some people would have you believe.


Next claim:
We are in a recession.
"The Economy is Fine (Really)" - The Wall Street Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120147855494820719.html

This is a favorite article of mine because it was out in Jan 2008, when literally every news media was forecasting a recession. This article from the WSJ forecast the opposite and they were right. Seriously, google "recession 2008" and marvel at the gloom and doom news articles from January.



Here's a good one from Forbes, dated June 2008: "After the Slowdown"
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/forbes/2008/0602/035.html
Now, if your definition of a recession is the traditional standard—two consecutive quarters of negative growth— rest assured, this isn’t going to happen. There’s no possibility now that the U.S. will suffer two consecutive quarters of negative growth in 2008, as there’s too much liquidity sloshing around. Also expect America’s small businesses to go on a second-half buying spree to take advantage of accelerated tax depreciation.


What the liberals are calling a "recession" is actually "slowed economic growth". We still have positive growth, but it's just not as positive as it used to be. Kinda like if I have a stock I bought at $10 and within the month it goes up to $15 and then the next month it goes to $15.50 and I proclaim economic doom because it didn't keep going up as fast as it used to.


I think there's a lot of disingenuous intent behind the cries of economic doom. I think if the events of today were going on under Obama, it would be all smiles and roses as the good parts of the economy would be under a spotlight and the negatives would be ignored, instead of what's happening today, which is the opposite. A lot of people in the press want Bush out of office big time and they're doing everything they can to keep you misinformed towards that end.

This is slowly getting to be the #1 reason why I won't vote for Obama: there's too much fishy stuff going on with the intent of getting him into power.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

oh man i this was a joke then i saw the date you couldnt have gotten that more wrong on purpose

Northern Paladin said...

Anonymous? What is it, boy? What are you trying to communicate? Did Timmy fall in the well again?? Oh if only you could talk!

Anonymous said...

glad u arent my financial advisor

Anonymous said...

Michelle Malkin? That's somewhere in the middle? Have you read "In Defense of Internment"? Or even the controversies section of her Wikipedia page (everything is cited)? Are you sure you want her in your blog list? Do you think we should be interning people?

-A friendly brand new Japanese-American citizen

Northern Paladin said...

I bought that book recently but haven't read it. I intend to. Did you read it? I don't intend to pass judgment on her opinion until I understand it better. I may well disagree with her but she is entitled to her opinion and I would fight to the death over her right to talk about it.

As for my personal opinion of Michelle Malkin's blog, I think she's an over-the-top conservative and her opinions in many cases go further down the right-wing road than I am willing to tread, but I've found her website to be a valuable resource. She picks up on a lot of "conservative news" (i.e. "things you will never hear about on NBC") and is good about posting links to her sources, enabling me to read into them further. She's also good about posting the exact text of legislation she doesn't like, something I have come to respect after being mislead many times by liberal doom-sayers who claim something about a piece of legislation without quoting it, and I find out later they were greatly exaggerating it or were simply lying (e.g., "habeas corpus").

You will rarely (if ever) see me quote Michelle Malkin or Wikipedia as a source, but both are great launching points if you're on a fact finding mission.

Northern Paladin said...

Here's some notes from Malkin's website about her book that might raise some interest:
http://michellemalkin.com/2004/08/03/in-defense-of-internment-2/
http://michellemalkin.com/2004/08/06/book-notes-4/

Perhaps there's more to the story than you realize. Apparently the best way to find out is to read more about it.

Anonymous said...

Launching point, smonching point. You sound like a politician. Do you think it was right to intern Japanese-Americans during WWII? And yes, I read it in college as part of a project.

Northern Paladin said...

Are you sure you read the book? I haven't read it and I already know what some of her arguments are:
That much of the internment was done to head off violence that the government wouldn't be able to control. We're talking about lynch mobs here. The public's feelings towards ethnic Japanese went far beyond anything we're familiar with today, particularly after a Japanese victory in the Philippines. As much animosity as the public came up with against ethnic middle easterners in the wake of 9/11, you have to realize that World War 2 was 9/11 times about a thousand.

There was also intelligence on a wide spread network of Japanese agents along the west coast (based on decoded Japanese intelligence messages). The government didn't know how to root out these agents from the general population.

Essentially, Malkin's argument, as I understand it, boils down to this:
Given the choice between accusations of racism or the destruction of America, we should risk the accusations of racism. When everyone who wants to blow up American jetliners is Arabic, it makes sense to engage in "racial profiling". We are wasting time searching the 80 year old granny and her 9 year old granddaughter just to "make it look fair" when there has been no incidence of a terrorist attack by an 80 year old grandmother or a 9 year old girl.

If you want a more specific answer about Japanese internment and whether I think it was justified, you'll have to wait until I read the book and have something more to base my opinion on, something I'm not convinced you've done. If you've really read the book, then tell me, what's YOUR opinion, Mr. Anonymous? I'd like to hear your counter arguments to whatever Malkin talks about in her book so I'll have those in hand when I read it.

Anonymous said...

You don't protect people by putting them in camps. Profile, fine, barb-wired camps, no.

Yes, I read the book. Did I enjoy it? No, it was for school. I understood it quite fine, basically it meant if I would have been alive in this country during WWII, people like you, making excuses like those, would have put me in a camp because my eyes are not the same shape as yours. I'm pretty sure your not Asian, call it a hunch.
-Mrs. Anon.

Northern Paladin said...

How does racial profiling protect the people being profiled? This was in a time of war -- a real war, something I hope neither of us has to actually be a party to, where American soil is bombed, American ships are sunk and American planes full of American crews are shot out of the sky on a daily basis. Over 100,000 American military were killed in the Asia-Pacific front alone, which compounded with over 180,000 lost in Europe no doubt brings on a mentality I cannot even fathom. Knowing that it was being done by "the Japanese" and not just a small group of radicals surely incited a lot of people.

I also found this claim from a website (I have not looked into its authenticity) --
"According to a 1948 government report on wartime internment, 56 percent of all non-renunciant internees (14,426 of 25,655) were Europeans and European-Americans—Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, even some Czechs and Poles. The total number of Japanese and Japanese-Americans interned was 16,849—not 120,000 as historical revisionists claim. Of that 16,849, however, nearly one-third—5,620—were renunciants. That is, after Pearl Harbor, 5,620 United States citizens of Japanese ancestry renounced their American citizenship so that they could be repatriated to Japan."

In a time of war, what do you do with a bunch of people from the aggressor nation who renounce their American citizenship while living in America? Send them home so they can climb into a plane and drop a bomb on you?

This story is already far more complicated that I imagined and I still haven't started on the book. Just looking up these few things to have an informed discussion with you is showing me there's more to the internment story than I realized.

I also found this:
"While this action is most commonly referred to as internment, some argue that relocation is a more appropriate term. The main arguments for this view are (1) internment occurs in a prison; the Japanese Americans were not required to stay in the camps and they were permitted to settle anywhere outside the exclusion area; (2) an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 internees did eventually settle outside the exclusion area; (3) the contemporaneous term used by Roosevelt administration and the WRA was relocation center and officials specifically distinguished the WRA camps from internment camps."

Reading on, there were two camps: "Relocation centers" and "Detainment Camps" with actual Japanese-American prisoners going to the detainment camps. Presumably the first quote was counting only "detainees" in its total of 16k and not the people who were "relocated" but were not in a prison camp.

An attempt to find out more through Wikipedia, of course, turned out to be useless, as that place is always a worthless mess of conflicted views on any political story. As the editors fight back and forth the whole entry on Japanese Internment Camps becomes a cluster of contradictory information and "citation needed" tags.

Apparently I'll just have to read the book.

I'm still not convinced you've read the book, as nothing you have said thus far has been specific to the topic at hand. I suspect you are attacking from an emotional platform with no more knowledge of the subject than I. Are you really a Japanese-American citizen arguing from the educated perspective of an informed reader or are you just a Malkin hater come to bait me? Some more specific counter-arguments from you would go far to ease my suspicions. At the very least you have to concede that it is a complicated topic.

I would further suggest that "do nothing" was not an option at the time, as many of the Japanese were loyal to Japan and Japan was now at war with America and how do you propose to sort out the peaceful citizens from the loyal and/or employed agents of the Japanese government? This was not some small radical group, an exception to the whole, this was the emperor of Japan engaging in war with his country at his back.

Anonymous said...

Anytime there is a market correction, it's doom, gloom, recession... but market corrections are neccessary. So many people don't understand and just want everything to be rosy, no risks for anyone. Well, there are always risks, always winners and loosers, it's a free market. People have to fail. When a business fails, someone who is better at it succeeds. Free market economies are for grown ups.
Here's a great link that explains recessions and what they are and why they are neccessary.

http://harvardbusiness.org/flatmm/hbextras/200805/recessions/