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2010-12-28 Home Front: Culture Wars

Consumer Confidence Shows Surprise Drop in December

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Posted by DarthVader 2010-12-28 13:28|| || Front Page|| [2 views ] Top

#1 Probably because of all the stupidity displayed by RINOs during the lame duck session.

Posted by gorb 2010-12-28 13:35|| 2010-12-28 13:35|| Front Page Top

#2 Why do you think they're called the "Stupid Party". HOPEFULLY, that will change with some new people coming into office. I've got high hopes for Allen West.

Posted by CincinnatusChili 2010-12-28 14:46|| 2010-12-28 14:46|| Front Page Top

#3 Men such as LTC(Ret) West give us hope. We need more like him.

Posted by Besoeker 2010-12-28 15:44|| 2010-12-28 15:44|| Front Page Top

#4 We are in a depression, dipshits.

Unemployment peaked at 25% during the Great Depression, with no safety nets like Social Security and unemployment insurance. Back then poor people starved to death, they didn't get fat. GDP dropped by more than a few percentage points, too. It may be very hard to find a job now, but what's happened thus far is nothing like it was then. It may yet do -- we've another wave of mortgage foreclosures yet to come, we don't seem to have made much progress on unwinding the derivatives problem, and our public debt is making the world very uncomfortable, but we certainly don't seem to be there yet.

Posted by trailing wife 2010-12-28 16:26|| 2010-12-28 16:26|| Front Page Top

#5 Unemployment peaked at 25% during the Great Depression, with no safety nets like Social Security and unemployment insurance.

So they had a true measure of unemployment.

The measure they use today is whether or not people claim unemployment.

And plenty of people have already come to the end of that rope, so they have fallen through the statistical cracks.

There are also those who have given up and decided to take care of grandma. There are those who are underemployed. There are those who have decided that now is a good time to raise kids as an at-home parent instead.

I'm pretty sure we are closer to 15% (or more) than we are to 9.5 or whatever they are claiming.

Posted by gorb 2010-12-28 16:58|| 2010-12-28 16:58|| Front Page Top

#6 U6 is 17%. And that 25% is probably calculated more like U6. And unemployment didn't reach 25% until 1933.

Housing prices continue to decline, probably another 10% to go. Problems in the financial industry have not been addressed. Leadership, especially Bernanke, is incompetent. We may not have starvation, but we will have people dying in the streets due to Obamacare.

It will be seen to have been a depression. It just isn't over yet.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2010-12-28 17:03|| 2010-12-28 17:03|| Front Page Top

#7 Back then poor people starved to death, they didn't get fat.

Do you have stats from non-liberal sources documenting this? My understanding is that the Grapes of Wrath vastly overstated the tribulations of Oklahoman migrants to California. A study of the migrants concluded that hunger wasn't really a problem for them, and most got steady jobs once they got to California. There was a story going around about how Soviet propagandists showed the Grapes of Wrath to domestic audiences as an example of capitalism's inhumanity to man, and all the Russian audiences could talk about was how the US was so rich, even the poor owned automobiles. People who starve to death don't own bicycles or even kitchen utensils, let alone cars. Much of what we "know" about America's past, from Upton Sinclair's screeds, to John Steinbeck's polemics, are lies. The unfortunate thing is that Hitler was right - if a lie is repeated often enough by a trusted source (i.e. a teacher), it will become recognized as the truth.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2010-12-28 18:56|| 2010-12-28 18:56|| Front Page Top

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