BREAKING: US economy shrank at 2.9 percent annual rate in first quarter

As of 11:15 a.m. EDT, markets are up slightly at this catastrophic economic news.

 

Just finished scanning a Merrill Lynch report attributing the drop to lower spending on health care by consumers. Isn't that supposed to be a good thing?

 

That kind of ties in to the Myth of GDP, for generations something we have looked at as a benchmark of a country's wealth.

But all kinds of not so good things go into GDP, including spending for health care.

 

The decline in health spending is also due to more pressure being put on hospitals to stop making mistakes. For example, Medicare no longer paying for certain rehospitalizations within 30 days. As it turned out, hospitals were making a lot of money charging others to take care of the hospitals' own screwups.

 

I laugh at how the media is eating up this bullshit about a harsh winter. As if there haven't been harsh winters before. And as if harsh winters don't lead to economic activities of their own, such as more spending to heat the home (energy producers must not be part of the economy), snowblowers, snowblower-repair shops, hardware stores (shovels, salt), private snowplow companies. And the global warming crowd was always so quick to point out that it was only about half the country having a harsh winter.

The idea that a harsh winter caused a 2.9% contraction of the economy is so loaded with bullshit I can smell it from Washington all the way here in the midwest.

The President of a Million Excuses.

 

Except no one -- well, no one with some reasonably sized fraction of a clue -- is saying the harsh winter caused a 2.9% reduction in GDP. What they're saying is that the harsh winter contributed to a first-quarter contraction that, if deseasonalized and then extended across an entire year*, would be 2.9%.

*The phrase is "seasonally adjusted annual rate".

 

Don't let the facts get in the way of Tony's political cheerleading. The man is rooting for this country to falter and fail as much as possible simply because there is a Democrat in the White House. Unfortunately, far too many of the Republican politicians he roots for have the same attitude.

 

In case you haven't looked around, the country IS faltering. With your hero in charge. You don't notice, though, because you're the one doing the cheerleading.

 

OK, let's look around.

Unemployment January 2009: 7.8% (9 consecutive months of increase, and up from 4.2% when previous administration left office)

Unemployment May 2014: 6.3% (down from 7.8%, when previous administration left office)

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Markets January 20, 2009: DJIA 7049, S&P 805, NASDAQ 1440

Markets June 25, 2014: DJIA 16857, S&P 1959, NASDAQ 4379

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Now . . . IF the country is faltering --- maybe it is; I'm not making a statement one way or another --- what the fuck was it doing at the beginning of this administration?

 

One, read BTE's post. Those darn facts keep tripping you up.

Two, he's not my hero. Unlike you, I'm not rooting for bad things to happen to the country just because I don't care for the current President of the United States. That is the territory of political cheerleaders like you, who care nothing for the well being of the country or its citizens. You only care if your beloved party does well and things happen that you can blame on the other guys.

Three, once again you violated the board policy against political discussion. This topic could be discussed without taking the thread down the toilet, but you just had to launch another attack on Obama, showing a blatant disrespect for the mods and the other members of SportsJournalists.com.

 

It was in the toilet. It crawled out of the toilet, but some believe that is only temporary. Time will tell.