Balta1701

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 03:28 PM) The White House doesn't have economists working for it? So did Obama either ignore them, or does he just have idiots working for him? He did not listen to the advisors who were calling for a much larger stimulus. This is entirely true. Some portion of that motivation may have been political, in that who knows what could have gotten through Congress if a larger one was asked for. The political advisors...such as Larry Summers and former Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel (name-dropping!) didn't wannt to push for too large of a stimulus because it would have been politically difficult.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 03:27 PM) And since it didn't actually do anything for the private sector, I'm glad to see you won't be supporting it. I think I've already derided it as "More of the same" in the other thread. Clearly it was undeserving of a joint Congressional address, I can't deny that. It would at least push the bond market in the right direction again. Way too much of it is tied up in payroll tax cuts, once again. Way too much. That's just going to go in the bank, just like this year's version. The aid to the states in it would be effective if that part survived. If the payroll tax cut were taken and actually used on infrastructure and things like building energy efficiency systems, it would be much more effective, even if it was just slammed out as fast as possible. One thing I haven't pointed out here...the slump in unemployment has been much larger and more persistent than the slump in GDP. That is directly reflecting the style of stimulus we chose. We saved the corporate sector and now its more profitable than ever, we kept the top tier tax cuts, but we took very limited effort on unemployment directly. We hired only a small number of people. By dealing with the corporate and financial sectors, we ensured GDP recovery, but we left the resources out there idled.

It has to be conditioning and technique. That has to be priority 1 this offseason. Whoever the hitting coach is has to be confident in these guys by the time Feb 21 rolls around.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 03:23 PM) Unless you work for the President, it doesn't matter. He and his party are the ones who told us we needed this. And since it was effective in stopping the slide, as demonstrated clearly in the GDP graph, but wound up being small due to the fact that the slump was larger than initially thought, I'm happy to have your support for the American Jobs Act.

Who on Earth is actually giving those odds? Unless it's the Chairman or the GM, they're meaningless, there's nothing given here that we already don't know. If the Chairman steps up and says no, he stays.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 03:20 PM) There is no real proof that an even bigger stimulus plan would have worked. There also wasn't the revisionist effort that we have seen since the stimulus plans failure to make it seem as such. Do I really need to go back and drag up the posts where I said it should be larger and less tax-cut-heavy again? I did that about a month ago.

Link

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 03:03 PM) I don't care what happened on the football field, the man should be blacklisted for what happened to Declan Sullivan. That's just my opinion though. IMO, it's hard to argue against that.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 03:13 PM) The whole point of a stimulus plan is to spur the economy back to recovery, so if it doesn't go into growth on its own, then yes it failed. Then why did you oppose crafting a stimulus that could have done that?

I'm sure the quibble will be with the author's identity rather than the methodology, but here is a different take on U6/Depression unemployment. It's also worth noting again that U6 started at ~9% at the start of this recession, so it has less than doubled, while by any reasonable calculation "Unemployment" went up by a factor of >5 during the depression. If "Depression era unemployment" = U6, then the 1920's produced U6 values of 3-4%. That's more than a little hard to believe.

To look at it another way, here is a graph I just made of the GDP numbers from the BLS. The Blue line is the actual GDP. Where as of this quarter, we are slightly below the 2007 peak. Not great, but not a complete collapse. The Red line is if we did what we did in 1930-1932. Nothing. If we just allowed the collapse to continue. The end of the red line is a GDP drop of ~22% from peak, about the same as where the country was in 1932 relative to the 1929 peak. That is an enormous difference. To honestly say that we're in the same position the country was in back in 1932 would mean that the economy had shrunk to the size it was during the middle of the Clinton Administration.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 02:48 PM) But you can't deny Hibbard's last paragraph. He makes a key point about baseball stats and sabes. Blaming Pierre is ridiculous when Matt sucked as well and others sucked. Dunn didn't help us win a game for the first 2 months. If Pierre had caught a couple fly balls, Matty would have looked a lot better, FWIW.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 01:20 PM) Until the Sox are willing to piss off Bud Selig, or slotting is agreed to, they will be average at best in the draft. Boston routinely finishes with a better record and look at their prospects the past 5 or 6 years. No one knows how it will turn out, but the CBA is up this offseason, and dealing with this issue in some way is at the top of Selig's list along with HGH testing.

If both this thread and your lineup are true, he's already been benched for Rios.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 02:36 PM) No $14 million man??? $11.5 is in there again. And we got another OF back today too.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 12:49 PM) Here is one for ya. 500 jobs, poof! Gone. Will Texas use less electricity because of these closures? Or will those jobs perhaps be picked up through increased production at other facilities, due to the constant demand for electricity?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 11:48 AM) Wait, you were just saying a near 10% drop the other day. Is this more of those "revised" figures? Somehow, I'm not surprised at this point that the concept of the BLS publishing "annualized" GDP numbers is a major scandal. Or at least something I'm covering up. I don't know how to make this clearer. 1930 ~8% drop in GDP over the full year 1931 ~6% drop in GDP over the full year 1932 ~10% drop in GDP over the full year By the time FDR took office, GDP had decreased by over 25%. Add error bars if you want since the data is old, but they're no more than 1-2%. In 2008, the Economy collapsed. It began collapsing at a ~5 % annual rate in Q3 of 2008 and at an 8.9% annualized rate in Q4 of 2008. Over the full period from the peak in December 2007 to the bottom in March 2009, GDP declined by 5%. You'll notice a couple things here. First, the 5% GDP drop is much less than the 25% GDP drop. However, the pace from Q4 of 2008 was, on an annualized basis, worse than the economic performance of 1930. However, unlike 1930, the government did something. TARP happened. The auto bailouts happened. Citigroup and BofA received special bailouts. The Federal Reserve pumped out several trillion in cash to prevent the money supply from declining. And there was a significant stimulus package passed. Because of all these things, instead of that -8.9% rate for 1 quarter repeating itself, the collapse stopped cold. The total GDP drop stopped at 5%, rather than continuing to march on. The economy instead resumed slow but nonzero growth, and at present, GDP sits just about 1% under the 2007 peak. Here is one of your exact quotes. QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 11, 2011 -> 01:29 PM) We are on the exact same path right now. I know you won't ever see it that way, well unless it was the GOPs fault, but they are remarkably similar, your comparision of unemployment levels actually would strengthen that because back then they didn't make all of the specialized adjustments for people who can't seek unemployment, the underemployed etc. Effective unemployment right now isn't too far from 20% in reality. The idea that we are on the exact same path right now is incorrect by an order of magnitude. We are currently 1% below peak GDP. In 1931, the U.S. was about 13% below peak GDP and collapsing fast, and would be 25% below within a little more than a year.. The U.S. has grown slowly, but non-zero since the financial industry imploded. The U.S. in 1931 was imploding by the day. You've danced around the issue by trying to say that unemployment statistics are counted differently, so I switched to employment to population. You then said jobs aren't really jobs in the same way. Fine, you're right...but that also undermines any claim that unemployment now is close to 20% (what do you think underemployment, which is counted in U6, was doing during the depression? Counting that would double the Depression's unemployment rate). Pick your statistic. You can't tell me that unemployment is close to 20% right now by using the U6 number which counts underemployment and then laugh off the unemployment estimates from the Depression which don't include underemployment in their count. The idea that we're on the 1931 path and that the stimulus failed is laughable. We were on the 1929 path at the end of 2008, but then we did something, and we diverted to a very different path.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 11:27 AM) The problem is that your data isn't going to be "real" unless all of the definitions are universal. I'm not sure how ignoring the changes in statistics since 1930 makes the information you have worthy of being the be all, end all for comparison's sake. Then again this started by you comparing unemployment rates from the two eras, so that should have been my first clue to let you keep letting the blogs tell you what to think. "The best data I can present, with noted caveats" >>>>> "2k5's totally unsupported contentions that things are worse now than in 1931 and the stimulus did nothing". Then again this started when you insisted without evidence that things are worse now after a 1% drop in GDP than after a 15 percentage point drop in GDP over a period of 2 years, so that should have been my first clue keep letting you make stuff up.

QUOTE (IowaSoxFan @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 11:14 AM) I think Morel has produced fine for a guy in his first full season, he has filled his role really well by playing excellent defense and he seems to work counts pretty well. If others would have played to their averages this is not even an issue. A lineup should be able to absorb a rookie performer like this. Gotta disagree here. Brent is at 3.5 pitches per plate appearance. That would be towards the bottom of the league in that regard. Not surprising since he never walks right now. Hopefully that number can improve in coming years, but the guy is goign to swing the bat.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 11:08 AM) The definition of a "job" isn't the same now as then either. So pretty much you have no real data to present but you're going to insist that the stimulus had no effect and employment has continually gotten worse since 2008 and things are clearly worse than the Great Depression because of Obama, and it's impossible to prove you wrong with data because none of the actual data that's out there counts. If you'll excuse me, I need to go wait in the bread line.

There were plenty of Democrats railing against Deficits in 2001-2006.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 11:00 AM) "Civilian employment" in 1929 meant something different than it does now. If they are using the data from those respective eras, you are comparing two different things. That is why we call it 9% unemployment today and 20% during the depression. No, no, no. This is a much simpler number. This is total number of available jobs divided by working aged population. Both graphs. There is no resetting here for the people that have dropped out of the labor force for whatever reason, they count as total population.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 10:55 AM) So out of curiosity are all of those including all of the "revisions" that have been done to the numbers? Do they both reflect the same definitions of "unemployment" or are they doing like you did in your first post and comparing completely different definitions of the same word to make a point that might not be true? I had to go to that graph to get "civilian employment to population ratio", and the civilian employment revisions are much smaller than the revisions to GDP have been. That's why I had to find a graph that doesn't go to the modern, because you wouldn't accept the increase in unemployment %age from 5 to 25% in the depression as being larger than the increase from 5 to 9% in this recession. So yes, both of those graphs are showing the same number, just with different horizontal and vertical scales. The FRED graph shows the numbers as they are now. If there are revisions made in the future, they will not be shown, due to the inability of the St. Louis Fed to predict the future.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 12, 2011 -> 10:52 AM) The end of the first graph is showing a pretty impressive downturn at today. The other one doesn't, as a matter of a fact it shows and up turn.. The first graph comes no where near to "Today". It gets through mid-2009. The debate was whether the stimulus measures by the Governmetn and the Fed kept the Great Contraction from happening. That graph shows it. The 2 lines continue to spread with time.

Yes they do, I was there for the anniversary of the founding of the Communist party in China and there were all sorts of performances and fireworks.