The government has not yet figured out how to intelligently and coherently gather and report what is happening in our economy. As an example, a major motor car manufacturer decided to outsource its employee cafeteria operation. They hired Marriott to perform this function, fired all of their cafeteria workers, who were mostly hired by Marriott. This meant that the government’s job figures showed a loss of manufacturing jobs, and an increase in service workers - but it was merely a shift in the government’s method of gathering and reporting employment figures. In fact, it was a distorted picture because of the archane methods used by the Feds.
The government has not yet figured out how to intelligently and coherently gather and report what is happening in our economy. As an example, a major motor car manufacturer decided to outsource its employee cafeteria operation. They hired Marriott to perform this function, fired all of their cafeteria workers, who were mostly hired by Marriott. This meant that the government’s job figures showed a loss of manufacturing jobs, and an increase in service workers - but it was merely a shift in the government’s method of gathering and reporting employment figures. In fact, it was a distorted picture because of the archane methods used by the Feds.
This looks like an urban myth. I have traced the first writing of it to an “intelligence briefing for CEO’s” written by Herbert Meyer.
A quick Google search (not even using its blog search engine) finds about 320 sites repeating it verbatim.
But if what you mean is, your opinion is that the figures are written by idiots, shouldn’t GWBush have been able to fix this in his 7 years as the best President ever?
As I posted in another thread, when government starts to imitate the market and use prizes to pick what technology is going to be the wave of the future, sell your stocks!
Corporate profits going up? Looks to me like capitalism is working. Newsflash, corporations have an obligation to stockholders to make money not to unions to provide jobs, and if that means going overseas for cheap labor to give stockholders more return on their investment, then they go overseas. Why would someone invest in a company that does not provide a good return? And if you have no investers, you have a small or non-existant company.
Looks like Bush is only half the president Jimmy Carter was.
Context is EVERYTHING. We were in double-digit unemployment during the Carter years, up through the early part of Reagan’s first term. You can’t just compare employment numbers, you also have to look at adding and losing and such. Expansion during Clinton’s term happened in spite of Clinton (and began the quarter BEFORE he became President), and actually took a downward turn near the end of his eight years. There hasn’t really been much of a net loss in jobs - if not a net gain - since the middle of Clinton’s term. The whole job-argument is a stupid one, anyway, until unemployment takes a nosedive of several percentage points, no matter WHO is President. Talk to me then.
The numbers that matter to me is AVERAGE INCOME, and how it relates to inflation, and the TYPES of jobs that we have and whether or not the middle class is making money.
