Drifting wrote:
How strong was your economy before Obama took office?
From 2008It's official: Recession since Dec. '07
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007, making official what most Americans have already believed about the state of the economy .
The NBER is a private group of leading economists charged with dating the start and end of economic downturns. It typically takes a long time after the start of a recession to declare its start because of the need to look at final readings of various economic measures.
The NBER said that the deterioration in the labor market throughout 2008 was one key reason why it decided to state that the recession began last year.
Employers have trimmed payrolls by 1.2 million jobs in the first 10 months of this year. On Friday, economists are predicting the government will report a loss of another 325,000 jobs for November.
The NBER also looks at real personal income, industrial production as well as wholesale and retail sales. All those measures reached a peak between November 2007 and June 2008, the NBER said.
In addition, the NBER also considers the gross domestic product, which is the reading most typically associated with a recession in the general public.
Many people erroneously believe that a recession is defined by two consecutive quarters of economic activity declining. That has yet to take place during this recession.
This downturn longer than most
The NBER did not give any reasons or causes of the recession. But it is widely accepted that the housing downturn, which started in 2006, is a primary cause of the broader economic malaise.
The fall of housing prices from peak levels reached earlier this decade cut deeply into home building and home purchases. This also caused a sharp rise in mortgage foreclosures, which in turn resulted in losses of hundreds of billions of dollars among the nation's leading banks and a tightening of credit.
The current recession is one of the longest downturns since the Great Depression of the 1930's.
The last two recessions (1990-1991 and 2001) lasted eight months each, and only two of the 10 previous post-Depression downturns lasted as long as a full year, according to the NBER.
I don't think you can wreck something that was already wrecked, but what do I know. Give Romney a go and see if he delivers what he said he would deliver.
Let's remind everybody what that is:
1. Create 12 million new jobs.
2. Achieve US energy independance within seven years (by 2020).
3. Cut the national deficit.
4. Set up new trade agreements.
5. Get tough with Iran.
6. Repeal the healthcare bill.
The reality is with the real start of Obamacare and the continuing deficits Obama continues to run up that we are looking at a new recession next year. I don't really believe we've had much of a recovery because Obama's policies have interfered too much with the private economy to allow it to thrive as it could. We need to exploit more of our own fossil fuel resources to get the economy moving again. Romney has plans that will get things moving. Obama hasn't got a plan. Obama can't even get 51 votes to get his budget passed through his Democratic Senate. The Republicans in the Senate can't filibuster a budget. So I'll be voting for the Mormon.
