“At the end of every year, we see a flurry of predictions for the coming year. None were as amusing as last year’s apocalyptic hysteria as the left contemplated the calamities they envisioned for 2017.
President Trump, they assured us, would destroy our and the global economy, “punish” journalists, quit Twitter, take over Voice of America, and of course, be impeached by year’s end.
Economic “Armageddon”
Pretty much everyone on the left predicted a Trump-made recession, but Paul Krugman one-upped them all when he predicted plunging markets that would “never” recover.
Greg Gutfeld nails this one:
In 2008 Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics. Isn’t it time he gets another?
Remember what he said way back on Election Day? Quote, “It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump. And markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? A first-pass answer is never.” That’s pretty awesome for a garden gnome.
But he’s no garden gnome. He’s a Nobel Prize-winning economist. A garden gnome could run circles around this bearded butthead. And every time he gets it wrong, he gets a raise. So he must be loaded now, as the stock market broke 23,000 and filings for unemployment benefits plunged to the lowest level since 1973.
Krugman also predicted a “global recession.””
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“I’m not sure these predictions are predictions at all. They seem to be that intoxicating brew of wishful thinking and fantasy that fuels the progressive left.
While not an actual prediction, the Norwalk Reflector wrote a lovely bit of satire stating that Trump would be impeached not just this year but by March.
—President Trump will be impeached by March. The reason for his impeachment is foggy right now, but it will likely stem either from his decision to give Alaska to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a birthday present or the fact that the wall project along the U.S.-Mexican border will be running $50 billion over budget due to Trump’s insistence that it be built with solid-gold bricks.
Trump will respond to the impeachment by denying that he was impeached. He will then deny the existence of the word “impeach.” The accuracy of that denial will be confirmed by the website Breitbart. After he is forcibly removed from the White House, Trump will deny that he was ever president. Breitbart will then post a story that Trump himself never actually existed, and the disgraced former president will vanish in an orange poof of logic.
. . . . I will be locked up in a journalism gulag for predicting President Trump’s impeachment. Breitbart will report that I never existed. The fact-checking website Politifact will rate that report “half-true,” and CNN will spend half the year trying to find me.
Like all good satire, there’s a kernel of truth in there. There were a lot of serious predictions that Trump would be impeached this year.
Via CNN:
The man dubbed “Prediction Professor” for accurately calling almost every presidential election since 1984, including the 2016 election, now forecasts the impeachment of President-elect Donald Trump.
“There’s a very good chance that Donald Trump could face impeachment,” Allan Lichtman told Erin Burnett on “Erin Burnett OutFront.”
Lichtman, a political historian who teaches at the American University in Washington, says he uses his own system of 13 true or false statements to judge whether the incumbent party will retain the White House. However, when it came to his bold prediction of a Trump impeachment, he told Burnett it’s based on his instinct.
“Instinct” apparently means if I wish really really hard and click my heels three times it will happen.”
“Not all writers on the left succumbed to Trump-Russia panic in 2017. January saw Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books dissecting the “muddled thinking” behind the U.S. intelligence community’s published analysis of Russia’s role in the election.
Glenn Greenwald, hand-holder of Edward Snowden, has spent the year cataloging at TheIntercept.com the “extraordinarily numerous, consequential, and reckless stories that have been published—and then corrected, rescinded, and retracted” by the mainstream media.
Distinguished Rutgers historian Jackson Lears, in a year-end essay in the London Review of Books, laments his Democratic Party’s intoxication with Trump-Russia conspiracies. The episode, he writes, is “like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anticommunist hysteria during the early 1950s.”
Few and far between are lapses into sanity by sources Americans actually read. Ms. Gessen herself points to a rare example in the New York Times last March, on the subject of Trump-Russia contacts:
“There have been courtesy calls, policy discussions and business contacts, though nothing has emerged publicly indicating anything more sinister. . . . Former diplomats and Russia specialists say it would have been absurd and contrary to American interests for the Trump team to avoid meetings with Russians, either during or since the campaign.”
In contrast, the Washington Post spent 6,700 words last week puzzling over President Trump’s reluctance to acknowledge Russia’s meddling without ever noticing that a calculated, orchestrated (and documented) Democratic strategy to paint him as a Russian mole might play a role.”
“Trump Adviser’s Visit to Moscow Got the F.B.I.’s Attention.” That was the page-one headline the New York Times ran on April 20, 2017, above its breathless report that “a catalyst for the F.B.I. investigation into connections between Russia and President Trump’s campaign” was a June 2016 visit to Moscow by Carter Page.
It was due to the Moscow trip by Page, dubbed a “foreign policy adviser” to the campaign, that “the F.B.I. obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court” in September — i.e., during the stretch run of the presidential campaign.
You’re to be forgiven if you’re feeling dizzy. It may not be too much New Year’s reverie; it may be that you’re reeling over the Times’ holiday-weekend volte-face: “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt.”
Seven months after throwing Carter Page as fuel on the collusion fire lit by then-FBI director James Comey’s stunning public disclosure that the Bureau was investigating possible Trump campaign “coordination” in Russia’s election meddling, the Gray Lady now says: Never mind. We’re onto Collusion 2.0, in which it is George Papadopoulos — then a 28-year-old whose idea of résumé enhancement was to feign participation in the Model U.N. — who triggered the FBI’s massive probe by . . . wait for it . . . a night of boozy blather in London.
What’s going on here?
Well, it turns out the Page angle and thus the collusion narrative itself is beset by an Obama-administration scandal: Slowly but surely, it has emerged that the Justice Department and FBI very likely targeted Page because of the Steele dossier, a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed disguised as intelligence reporting. Increasingly, it appears that the Bureau failed to verify Steele’s allegations before the DOJ used some of them to bolster an application for a spying warrant from the FISA court (i.e., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).
Thanks to the persistence of the House Intelligence Committee led by Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), the dossier story won’t go away. Thus, Democrats and their media friends have been moving the goal posts in an effort to save their collusion narrative. First, we were led to believe the dossier was no big deal because the FBI would surely have corroborated any information before the DOJ fed it to a federal judge in a warrant application. Then, when the Clinton campaign’s role in commissioning the dossier came to light, we were told it was impertinent to ask about what the FBI did, if anything, to corroborate it since this could imperil intelligence methods and sources — and, besides, such questions were just a distraction from the all-important Mueller investigation (which the dossier had a hand in instigating and which, to date, has turned up no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy).
Lately, the story has morphed into this: Well, even if the dossier was used, it was only used a little — there simply must have been lots of other evidence that Trump was in cahoots with Putin. But that’s not going to fly: Putting aside the dearth of collusion evidence after well over a year of aggressive investigation, the dossier is partisan propaganda. If it was not adequately corroborated by the FBI, and if the Justice Department, without disclosing its provenance to the court, nevertheless relied on any part of it in a FISA application, that is a major problem.
So now, a new strategy to prop up the collusion tale: Never mind Page — lookee over here at Papadopoulos!”
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And some, especially those who desperately want to believe it’s true, fall for it again.
“Today, Andy McCarthy at National Review demolishes the story. He calls it all the “Russian Reset.”
It has become increasingly clear that Steele’s claims about Page are, at best, highly dubious; more likely, they are untrue. Aside from the fact that Comey has been dismissive of the dossier as “unverified,” Page has vigorously and plausibly denied its allegations about him. The Annapolis grad and former naval-intelligence officer insists he is not even acquainted with the Russian officials with whom he supposedly had traitorous meetings. Moreover, if the Russian regime truly wanted to make insidious proposals to Trump, it had emissaries far better positioned to approach him; it strains credulity to believe the Kremlin would turn to Page — barely known to Trump and, years earlier, derided as an “idiot” by a Russian intelligence operative who tried to recruit him.
So now, with the Page foundation of the collusion narrative collapsing, and with the heat on over the Obama administration’s use of the dossier, it is apparently Papadopoulos to the rescue.
In the Times’ new version of events, it was not the dossier that “so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election.” That, according to the Times, is a false claim that “Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged.” Somehow, the paper omits the inconvenient details that it was the Times that led the charge in claiming that it was Page’s trip to Moscow that provoked the investigation, and that it was the dossier that so alarmed the FBI about that trip.
In what we might think of as the latest “Russian Reset,” the Times now says the investigation was instigated by “firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies” — Australia. Turns out Papadopoulos was out drinking in London with Alexander Downer, “Australia’s top diplomat in Britain.” Tongue loosened, the “young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign” made a “startling revelation” to Downer: He had learned that “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.”
Exactly so. You see over and over, particularly in our comments section, people claiming the Trump dossier is “verified.” Comey himself called it “unverified” in public testimony. And left unmentioned is the fact that if the dossier is “unverified,” or, more broadly put, if Comey wasn’t lying out his @#$ to Congress, then it means the FBI passed an “unverified” document off on the FISA court to get a surveillance warrant on both Carter Page and, in November, on Paul Manafort.
Having staked their credibility to what appears to be a FSB/SVR disinformation campaign–most of Steele’s sources were current or retired Russian intelligence officers; Steele met none of them and can’t even know if they exist; and the odds of a current or retired intelligence officer being asked information about a US presidential candidate and NOT reporting it to anyone is exactly zero–directed at Steele, the people in the FBI and Justice, those in the social/political cabal of McCabe, Strzok, Ohr, and Page, are leaking like mad to shift the focus.
To say this story has holes in it does not do justice to the craters on display. To begin with, the Times admits that “exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said” to Downer “is unclear.” What we are dealing with here is sheer supposition. And, it appears, flawed supposition.
Unclear, indeed. The Australians are declining to comment on this beyond expressing “surprise.” Surprise is what one would feel if they suddenly found themselves at Ground Zero of a political fight when they can’t deny saying what is attributed to them.
There is no evidence that Papadopoulos or the Trump campaign was ever shown or given any of the emails the Kremlin purportedly had. The evidence, in fact, undermines the collusion narrative: If the Trump campaign had to learn, through Papadopoulos, that Russia supposedly had thousands of emails damaging to Clinton, that would necessarily mean the Trump campaign had nothing to do with Russia’s acquisition of the emails. This, no doubt, is why Mueller permitted Papadopoulos to plead guilty to a mere process crime — lying in an FBI interview. If there were evidence of an actual collusion conspiracy, Papadopoulos would have been pressured to admit guilt to it. He wasn’t.”
I had heard stories about what was happening with the church in Iran. This weekend I read this:
"As Iran is back in the news, it’s good to consider this encouraging reality: Persecution threatened to wipe out Iran’s tiny church. Instead, the church in Iran has become the fastest growing in the world.” @TGChttps://t.co/6Zcr11TvJrpic.twitter.com/p7lS5miY0Q
“The Trump administration has decided to withhold millions in military aid to Pakistan as the president accuses the Muslim-majority nation of harboring terrorists and telling “lies” to the United States.
“The United States does not plan to spend the $255 million in [Fiscal Year] 2016 Foreign Military Financing for Pakistan at this time,” a National Security Council official told Fox News on Monday.
The official added, “The president has made clear that the United States expects Pakistan to take decisive action against terrorists and militants on its soil, and that Pakistan’s actions in support of the South Asia Strategy will ultimately determine the trajectory of our relationship, including future security assistance.”
The Trump administration will continue to “review Pakistan’s level of cooperation,” the official said.”
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The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!
“Pakistan lashed out Monday after President Trump accused its leaders of “lies & deceit” and suggested the United States would withdraw financial assistance to the nuclear-armed nation it once saw as a key ally against terrorism.
U.S. Ambassador David Hale was summoned to the Foreign Ministry to discuss the president’s statement, U.S. Embassy spokesman Richard Snelsire said. Pakistan lodged a strongly worded protest and asked for clarification about Trump’s comments, according to two foreign office officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, called a Cabinet meeting for Tuesday and a meeting of the National Security Committee on Wednesday to discuss Trump’s New Year’s Day tweet.
It was the president’s latest broadside against Pakistan after a speech in August in which he demanded its leaders crack down on the safe havens enjoyed by Taliban militants fighting U.S.-backed forces in neighboring Afghanistan.”
Chas’s prediction for 2018:
Next December they will be discussing the Muller investigation into Russian collusion into the election. There will be no evidence, but lots of talking heads discussing the Fake News.
It’s a couple weeks old, but John MacArthur’s eulogy at R.C. Sproul’s memorial service was moving and fascinating, including his account of some behind-the-scenes discussions after the unfortunate publication of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together statement. MacArthur quotes Sproul as declaring to some of the document’s signers, “This has to do with whether or not you are saved!”
Michelle, We had fun. I made friends with one Trumpkin over football. However the highlight of the weekend was that both Kevin D. Williamson and Valerie Adams retweeted one of my Tweets. I think I am now as addicted to Twitter as is Trump.
“Huma Abedin forwarded sensitive State Department emails, including passwords to government systems, to her personal Yahoo email account before every single Yahoo account was hacked, a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of emails released as part of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch shows.
Abedin, the top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, used her insecure personal email provider to conduct sensitive work. This guarantees that an account with high-level correspondence in Clinton’s State Department was impacted by one or more of a series of breaches — at least one of which was perpetrated by a “state-sponsored actor.”
The U.S. later charged Russian intelligence agent Igor Sushchin with hacking 500 million Yahoo email accounts. The initial hack occurred in 2014 and allowed his associates to access accounts into 2015 and 2016 by using forged cookies. Sushchin also worked for the Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital, which paid former President Bill Clinton $500,000 for a June 2010 speech in Moscow.
A separate hack in 2013 compromised three billion accounts across multiple Yahoo properties, and the culprit is still unclear. “All Yahoo user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft,” the company said in a statement.”
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“Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, regularly forwarded work emails to her personal humamabedin@ yahoo.com address. “She would use these accounts if her (State) account was down or if she needed to print an email or document. Abedin further explained that it was difficult to print from the DoS system so she routinely forwarded emails to her non-DoS accounts so she could more easily print,” an FBI report says.
Abedin sent passwords for her government laptop to her Yahoo account on Aug. 24, 2009, an email released by the State Department in September 2017 shows.
Long-time Clinton confidante Sid Blumenthal sent Clinton an email in July 2009 with the subject line: “Important. Not for circulation. You only. Sid.” The message began “CONFIDENTIAL… Re: Moscow Summit.” Abedin forwarded the email to her Yahoo address, potentially making it visible to hackers.”
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Vastly amused the right have discovered falling unemployment rates and the rising stock market. Both have been happening since approx 2010. A bit late but welcome to the booming American economy since 2010.
Of course prior to the Trump presidency, many on the right denied the legitimacy of the unemployment rate. The right maintained the existence of a large cadre of uncounted unemployed. Google “are unemployed rates valid” . A plethora of links mostly pre-Trump will earnestly explain why unemployed rates aren’t valid. Now of course the rates are valid.
So in 2017, the American right discovered unemployment rates are valid and the economy is in good shape. We can add this to their new found distrust in law enforcement. If this was 2015, you would think they were Obama supporters
My economist friend will grudgingly admit Krugman deserves the prize. (its not a nobel rather a prize awarded by the swedish central bank in memory of Alfred Nobel). In fairness to Krugman, his prediction was based on Trump actually implementing his populist agenda.
I do see an economic slowdown in the next year. First simply because it is time. Recessions usually occur about 8 years apart and last about two years. The last 6-8 years have been steady economic growth (a fact the republicans tried gard to ignore) and thus its time. The trigger will probably be the implementation of Trump’s first budget. The spending cuts won’t be u implemented til late this year but the withdrawal of federal funds will slow the economy. Now some will claim the tax cuts will replace the federal funds in the economy. The error is in assuming these tax cuts will go directly to the economy. I don’t see it — most of these funds will go into savings, debt mgmt or overseas investment.
While I’m making predictions….the Mueller probe will continue but actual indictments based on Russian collusion probably won’t happen. Its much easier to prove perjury than to somehow explain to a jury the tangled nature of diplomacy and international finance. However Trump’s weak spot will be his own financial situation. Either his ties to DB and Russian or his tendency to engage in small time corruption at his golf courses ( or Washington hotel) may give him more difficulty than actual proven electoral collusion.
Solar asked why the US should work with Iran….probably for similar reasons why Nixon went to China…..
The Saudis and Iran are engaged in several proxy wars in the Middle East. Currently the US (and Israel) support the Saudis but why? In Yemen the Saudis are allied with groups that include ISIS/al-queda groups which the US used to send drones after. Now the US sends drones after the group who fights the Saudis and ISIS allies. Similar events are occuring in Syria, Iraq and Bahrain. As the Americans have stuck with the Saudis, the Russians have allied themselves with Iran.
The Israelis support the Saudis because it destablizes their neighbors and it helps in their fight against Hezbollah. But the US is better off making nice with Iran if they are serious in fighting ISIS/al-queda and stablizing Iraq/Syria. As an added benefit this will marginalize Russia in the middle east.
I’m convinced hwesseli has this text set up in a macro on his machine. It’s the introductory text to all his posts here. 😉 Of course, it cuts both ways, but shhhhhh, don’t tell him.
Someone else must have asked why the US should work with Iran. I didn’t.
They have. But once off the books and not officially counted, they refer to it as Labor Force
Participation Rate. Which rose constantly under Obama, but has finally started ticking down under Trump.
While HRW wants us to believe it’s all Obama’s doing, the Trump Effect is very real. So real in fact that even the NYT has had to admit it, much as that pains them. Deregulation of Obama’s job and economy crushing policies and rules is having a positive effect.
“Dow 25,000 within Trump’s first term: Peter Navarro Dow 25,000 within Trump’s first term: Peter Navarro
8:40 AM ET Wed, 9 Nov 2016 | 05:08
Donald Trump has the potential to be a massive force for good for the economy.
The story of the American economy in the past eight years is one of tension between an aggressive “monetary” policy and a nonexistent “fiscal” policy.
Monetary policy has come from the Fed lowering interest rates to nearly zero in an effort to pump up the economy. This policy has led to tepid growth, and essentially run its course. There is only so much the Fed can do.
Fiscal policy is a combination of reforming the corporate tax code and government spending on big projects that will pump money into the economy and create new jobs. With Republicans now in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, the years-long standoff may be broken.”
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“You can call it the Trump effect. For the first time since the economic crisis, more Americans feel positive about the economy than negative about it, a Pew Research survey found.
“What a difference a year, and possibly an election, makes,” Pew reported Monday. “Nearly six-in-ten people in the United States (58%) say the economic situation is very or somewhat good, according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted Feb. 16-March 15. Last spring, 44% of the American public described the economy as good.”
It’s the most positive people have felt about the economy since 2007 — a year before the economic crisis — and only the second time that half or more of those surveyed have given the economy a thumbs-up, Pew reported.
Driving the higher scores are Republicans feelings about the economy — and their trust that President Donald Trump will improve lagging GDP growth, invest in infrastructure and tax reform, all of which will spur economic prosperity and improve job opportunities and wage growth.
About six in 10 Republicans and Democrats say economic conditions are very or somewhat good, and more than half of independents agree. The GOP’s good feelings about the economy has about doubled in the past year.”
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“The number of people filing for unemployment benefits last week came in “unexpectedly” low. Instead of 240,000 claims, there were 236,000, which marked the third week in a row this number has dropped.
That’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. It’s just one measure, after all, and the differences aren’t huge.
Except it adds to a pile of “unexpectedly” good economic reports that have been coming out these days.
ADP reported that payrolls “unexpectedly” climbed 190,000 in November, while analysts had predicted 185,000.
Consumer confidence “unexpectedly” hit a 17-year high in November.
Labor costs “unexpectedly” fell in the third quarter while productivity surged. Economists thought costs would edge up by 0.3%.
Retail sales in October “unexpectedly” rose. Economists had expected them to be flat.
These are pulled just from headlines of the past few weeks. But the trend started almost as soon as President Trump took office.
Normally, it takes months for a new administration’s economic policies to take effect. But there was a sharp surge in business and consumer optimism, and the stock market has been on an upward trajectory, since the day Trump got elected. The IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index has been in positive territory for 15 months straight. What’s more, Trump was able to take immediate executive action on regulations, which sent a signal to businesses, markets and consumers alike.
Now it appears that overall economic growth for the entire year could be, you guessed it, “unexpectedly” high.”
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We want the labor participation rate to go up not down. It jumped around in 2017. The November 2017 rate was a tiny bit lower than the January 2017 rate, but equal to the December, 2016 rate.
AJ was right that the labor participation rate trended downward for the first six years of the Obama Administration before flattening out near the current level in 2015 and 2016.
“If we learned one thing this past year, it’s that the Mayans do not have a lock on failing to predict the Apocalypse. Democrats do. From the moment President Donald J. Trump hit 270 electoral votes, through net neutrality repeal and tax cuts, Democrats have predicted that the world would end.
Ever since The Day Democrats Reached Out, I’ve been watching the hilarious hyperbolic reactions to every Trump tweet, and each piece of lint that flutters through the Oval Office. The Democrat reaction to every single move by the Trump Administration amounts to, “We’re all gonna die”.
Remember the mass deportation of Mexicans? Neither do I. Yet we we’re all gonna die. My Democrat friends here in Southern Wackyfornia told me that their maids and nannies were terrified that they were going to be rounded up because Trump was a racist.
Remember the mass deportation of Muslims? Neither do I. Yet we we’re all gonna die. During the March of the Week Spectacular that occurred early in 2017, Democrats clogged airports to protest the 90-day visa hold – a policy enacted merely to ensure the safety of Americans.
Remember how Trump’s election empowered hate groups to go and beat innocent minorities, and that we were all gonna die? Neither do I. What I do remember is the leftist group ANTIFA, whose very name epitomizes the phrase “unintended irony”, beating the crap out of innocent Americans and starting riots every chance they got – oh, but usually to shut down free speech. It was so bad in Berkeley that even the Washington Post couldn’t ignore the truth.
Remember how Trump is Hitler and Steve Bannon is a white nationalist – and that we we’re all gonna die? Neither do I. I never quite understood how Trump could be Hitler given his staunch support of Israel, and having the courage to do what no other President did by acknowledging Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Meanwhile, the Left remains determined to divide the country via identity politics, and Bannon made his position clear.”
“During the Obama administration, a major reason the unemployment rate declined was that fewer people were in the labor force because what the BLS calls the labor participation rate continually declined as people gave up the search for a job or retired. For purposes of the official unemployment rate, if you have not looked for a job in the past 30 days, the BLS considers you out of the labor force.
Under President Obama, labor participation hit lows last seen in the late 1970s. So rather than a true reflection of labor market strength, the declining unemployment rate was, in great part, a reflection of the declining percentage of people actively looking for work. What we really want to see is a declining unemployment rate with a higher percentage of people working or actively looking for work, indicating a strong and growing economy.
In September, that’s exactly what we had. While the unemployment rate declined to a 16-year low, the labor participation rate rose from 62.9 percent to 63.1 percent, exceeding 63 percent for the first time in 42 months. In other words, in September, a smaller percentage of people were unemployed while the workforce expanded because a larger percentage of people were working or actively looking for work. That is very positive economic news.
An even better indicator of labor market strength than the official unemployment rate is what the BLS calls the U-6 unemployment rate, a broader measure that many economists consider the real unemployment rate. It counts people as unemployed for a year after they give up their job search, rather than just 30 days, and discounts the importance of part time jobs by counting people as unemployed who are working part time because they are unable to find full time jobs.”
Barack Obama’s presidency began with a record number of Americans not in the labor force, and it’s ending the same way.
The final jobs report of the Obama presidency, released Friday, shows that the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased by 14,573,000 (18.09 percent) since January 2009, when Obama took office, continuing a long-term trend that began well before Obama was sworn in.
In December, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, a record 95,102,000 Americans were not in the labor force, 47,000 more than in November; and the labor force participation rate was 62.7 percent, a tenth of a point higher than in November.
The participation rate dropped to a 38-year low of 62.4 percent on Obama’s watch, in September 2015. It was only 3-tenths of a point higher than that last month.
Someone didn’t get his second scoop of ice cream tonight:
North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!
Uh-oh. Either the White House is completely out of ice cream or Mueller is indicting more people in the morning.
I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o’clock. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!
HRW @ 2:01 If you are looking for likely causes for your predicted future economic slowdown, here is my nominee:
As promised (and eagerly awaited!), here's my riveting deep-dive re "Section 301": "Chinese Intellectual Property Policies Demand a Smart U.S. Trade Policy Response – One President Trump Doesn’t Appear to be Considering" https://t.co/Fq7WZzHRFI via @CatoInstitute
Trump should do his Fake News Awards at the State of the Union and launch on North Korea at the same time, while simultaneously firing Mueller. Then the next day he should ask why the media haven’t covered the stock market.
Very Interesting. Fusion GPS speaks out and asks Congressional committees to release their testimony. Byron York agrees. I agree.
Time for House and Senate to release all transcripts, other info on Fusion GPS role in Trump dossier. Now. It's what the company's founders want. https://t.co/Ihjet1s4EW
So this Fusion GPS piece in the Times must be the reason for Trump's Twitter meltdown today, right? Also explains his promo for Hannity. Coordinated deflection between a president and a news network. Cool. Totally normal.
Wandering Views 
2017 and the left’s promised calamities that didn’t happen.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2018/01/the-lefts-2017-trump-predictions-an-array-of-calamities-that-never-happened/
“At the end of every year, we see a flurry of predictions for the coming year. None were as amusing as last year’s apocalyptic hysteria as the left contemplated the calamities they envisioned for 2017.
President Trump, they assured us, would destroy our and the global economy, “punish” journalists, quit Twitter, take over Voice of America, and of course, be impeached by year’s end.
Economic “Armageddon”
Pretty much everyone on the left predicted a Trump-made recession, but Paul Krugman one-upped them all when he predicted plunging markets that would “never” recover.
Greg Gutfeld nails this one:
In 2008 Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics. Isn’t it time he gets another?
Remember what he said way back on Election Day? Quote, “It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump. And markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? A first-pass answer is never.” That’s pretty awesome for a garden gnome.
But he’s no garden gnome. He’s a Nobel Prize-winning economist. A garden gnome could run circles around this bearded butthead. And every time he gets it wrong, he gets a raise. So he must be loaded now, as the stock market broke 23,000 and filings for unemployment benefits plunged to the lowest level since 1973.
Krugman also predicted a “global recession.””
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“I’m not sure these predictions are predictions at all. They seem to be that intoxicating brew of wishful thinking and fantasy that fuels the progressive left.
While not an actual prediction, the Norwalk Reflector wrote a lovely bit of satire stating that Trump would be impeached not just this year but by March.
—President Trump will be impeached by March. The reason for his impeachment is foggy right now, but it will likely stem either from his decision to give Alaska to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a birthday present or the fact that the wall project along the U.S.-Mexican border will be running $50 billion over budget due to Trump’s insistence that it be built with solid-gold bricks.
Trump will respond to the impeachment by denying that he was impeached. He will then deny the existence of the word “impeach.” The accuracy of that denial will be confirmed by the website Breitbart. After he is forcibly removed from the White House, Trump will deny that he was ever president. Breitbart will then post a story that Trump himself never actually existed, and the disgraced former president will vanish in an orange poof of logic.
. . . . I will be locked up in a journalism gulag for predicting President Trump’s impeachment. Breitbart will report that I never existed. The fact-checking website Politifact will rate that report “half-true,” and CNN will spend half the year trying to find me.
Like all good satire, there’s a kernel of truth in there. There were a lot of serious predictions that Trump would be impeached this year.
Via CNN:
The man dubbed “Prediction Professor” for accurately calling almost every presidential election since 1984, including the 2016 election, now forecasts the impeachment of President-elect Donald Trump.
“There’s a very good chance that Donald Trump could face impeachment,” Allan Lichtman told Erin Burnett on “Erin Burnett OutFront.”
Lichtman, a political historian who teaches at the American University in Washington, says he uses his own system of 13 true or false statements to judge whether the incumbent party will retain the White House. However, when it came to his bold prediction of a Trump impeachment, he told Burnett it’s based on his instinct.
“Instinct” apparently means if I wish really really hard and click my heels three times it will happen.”
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But wait, there’s more…….
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-year-in-trump-russia-hysteria-1514586201?shareToken=st41784a7487414fa8a179b08946caea97&reflink=article_email_share
“Not all writers on the left succumbed to Trump-Russia panic in 2017. January saw Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books dissecting the “muddled thinking” behind the U.S. intelligence community’s published analysis of Russia’s role in the election.
Glenn Greenwald, hand-holder of Edward Snowden, has spent the year cataloging at TheIntercept.com the “extraordinarily numerous, consequential, and reckless stories that have been published—and then corrected, rescinded, and retracted” by the mainstream media.
Distinguished Rutgers historian Jackson Lears, in a year-end essay in the London Review of Books, laments his Democratic Party’s intoxication with Trump-Russia conspiracies. The episode, he writes, is “like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anticommunist hysteria during the early 1950s.”
Few and far between are lapses into sanity by sources Americans actually read. Ms. Gessen herself points to a rare example in the New York Times last March, on the subject of Trump-Russia contacts:
“There have been courtesy calls, policy discussions and business contacts, though nothing has emerged publicly indicating anything more sinister. . . . Former diplomats and Russia specialists say it would have been absurd and contrary to American interests for the Trump team to avoid meetings with Russians, either during or since the campaign.”
In contrast, the Washington Post spent 6,700 words last week puzzling over President Trump’s reluctance to acknowledge Russia’s meddling without ever noticing that a calculated, orchestrated (and documented) Democratic strategy to paint him as a Russian mole might play a role.”
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When narratives (and false reporting) fail.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455036/new-york-times-trump-russia-collusion-narrative-reset-george-papadopoulos-carter-page
“Trump Adviser’s Visit to Moscow Got the F.B.I.’s Attention.” That was the page-one headline the New York Times ran on April 20, 2017, above its breathless report that “a catalyst for the F.B.I. investigation into connections between Russia and President Trump’s campaign” was a June 2016 visit to Moscow by Carter Page.
It was due to the Moscow trip by Page, dubbed a “foreign policy adviser” to the campaign, that “the F.B.I. obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court” in September — i.e., during the stretch run of the presidential campaign.
You’re to be forgiven if you’re feeling dizzy. It may not be too much New Year’s reverie; it may be that you’re reeling over the Times’ holiday-weekend volte-face: “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt.”
Seven months after throwing Carter Page as fuel on the collusion fire lit by then-FBI director James Comey’s stunning public disclosure that the Bureau was investigating possible Trump campaign “coordination” in Russia’s election meddling, the Gray Lady now says: Never mind. We’re onto Collusion 2.0, in which it is George Papadopoulos — then a 28-year-old whose idea of résumé enhancement was to feign participation in the Model U.N. — who triggered the FBI’s massive probe by . . . wait for it . . . a night of boozy blather in London.
What’s going on here?
Well, it turns out the Page angle and thus the collusion narrative itself is beset by an Obama-administration scandal: Slowly but surely, it has emerged that the Justice Department and FBI very likely targeted Page because of the Steele dossier, a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed disguised as intelligence reporting. Increasingly, it appears that the Bureau failed to verify Steele’s allegations before the DOJ used some of them to bolster an application for a spying warrant from the FISA court (i.e., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).
Thanks to the persistence of the House Intelligence Committee led by Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), the dossier story won’t go away. Thus, Democrats and their media friends have been moving the goal posts in an effort to save their collusion narrative. First, we were led to believe the dossier was no big deal because the FBI would surely have corroborated any information before the DOJ fed it to a federal judge in a warrant application. Then, when the Clinton campaign’s role in commissioning the dossier came to light, we were told it was impertinent to ask about what the FBI did, if anything, to corroborate it since this could imperil intelligence methods and sources — and, besides, such questions were just a distraction from the all-important Mueller investigation (which the dossier had a hand in instigating and which, to date, has turned up no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy).
Lately, the story has morphed into this: Well, even if the dossier was used, it was only used a little — there simply must have been lots of other evidence that Trump was in cahoots with Putin. But that’s not going to fly: Putting aside the dearth of collusion evidence after well over a year of aggressive investigation, the dossier is partisan propaganda. If it was not adequately corroborated by the FBI, and if the Justice Department, without disclosing its provenance to the court, nevertheless relied on any part of it in a FISA application, that is a major problem.
So now, a new strategy to prop up the collusion tale: Never mind Page — lookee over here at Papadopoulos!”
————————
And some, especially those who desperately want to believe it’s true, fall for it again.
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More…..
https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2018/01/01/andy-mccarthy-calls-bullcrap-papadopoulos-story/
“Today, Andy McCarthy at National Review demolishes the story. He calls it all the “Russian Reset.”
It has become increasingly clear that Steele’s claims about Page are, at best, highly dubious; more likely, they are untrue. Aside from the fact that Comey has been dismissive of the dossier as “unverified,” Page has vigorously and plausibly denied its allegations about him. The Annapolis grad and former naval-intelligence officer insists he is not even acquainted with the Russian officials with whom he supposedly had traitorous meetings. Moreover, if the Russian regime truly wanted to make insidious proposals to Trump, it had emissaries far better positioned to approach him; it strains credulity to believe the Kremlin would turn to Page — barely known to Trump and, years earlier, derided as an “idiot” by a Russian intelligence operative who tried to recruit him.
So now, with the Page foundation of the collusion narrative collapsing, and with the heat on over the Obama administration’s use of the dossier, it is apparently Papadopoulos to the rescue.
In the Times’ new version of events, it was not the dossier that “so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election.” That, according to the Times, is a false claim that “Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged.” Somehow, the paper omits the inconvenient details that it was the Times that led the charge in claiming that it was Page’s trip to Moscow that provoked the investigation, and that it was the dossier that so alarmed the FBI about that trip.
In what we might think of as the latest “Russian Reset,” the Times now says the investigation was instigated by “firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies” — Australia. Turns out Papadopoulos was out drinking in London with Alexander Downer, “Australia’s top diplomat in Britain.” Tongue loosened, the “young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign” made a “startling revelation” to Downer: He had learned that “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.”
Exactly so. You see over and over, particularly in our comments section, people claiming the Trump dossier is “verified.” Comey himself called it “unverified” in public testimony. And left unmentioned is the fact that if the dossier is “unverified,” or, more broadly put, if Comey wasn’t lying out his @#$ to Congress, then it means the FBI passed an “unverified” document off on the FISA court to get a surveillance warrant on both Carter Page and, in November, on Paul Manafort.
Having staked their credibility to what appears to be a FSB/SVR disinformation campaign–most of Steele’s sources were current or retired Russian intelligence officers; Steele met none of them and can’t even know if they exist; and the odds of a current or retired intelligence officer being asked information about a US presidential candidate and NOT reporting it to anyone is exactly zero–directed at Steele, the people in the FBI and Justice, those in the social/political cabal of McCabe, Strzok, Ohr, and Page, are leaking like mad to shift the focus.
To say this story has holes in it does not do justice to the craters on display. To begin with, the Times admits that “exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said” to Downer “is unclear.” What we are dealing with here is sheer supposition. And, it appears, flawed supposition.
Unclear, indeed. The Australians are declining to comment on this beyond expressing “surprise.” Surprise is what one would feel if they suddenly found themselves at Ground Zero of a political fight when they can’t deny saying what is attributed to them.
There is no evidence that Papadopoulos or the Trump campaign was ever shown or given any of the emails the Kremlin purportedly had. The evidence, in fact, undermines the collusion narrative: If the Trump campaign had to learn, through Papadopoulos, that Russia supposedly had thousands of emails damaging to Clinton, that would necessarily mean the Trump campaign had nothing to do with Russia’s acquisition of the emails. This, no doubt, is why Mueller permitted Papadopoulos to plead guilty to a mere process crime — lying in an FBI interview. If there were evidence of an actual collusion conspiracy, Papadopoulos would have been pressured to admit guilt to it. He wasn’t.”
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The picture which Dreher paints of young Muslims is an accurate picture of what I see from young Muslims here in Texas.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-for-muslims/
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I had heard stories about what was happening with the church in Iran. This weekend I read this:
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I know some here have written about immigrants moving to Texas and making it more liberal. I have to admit they were right.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/02/white-voters-are-moving-to-the-south-and-making-it-more-democratic/?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-politics%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.8d1f3ed43f1d
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Trump’s right again.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/01/01/trump-withholding-millions-in-aid-to-pakistan-as-accuses-country-giving-safe-haven-to-terrorists.html
“The Trump administration has decided to withhold millions in military aid to Pakistan as the president accuses the Muslim-majority nation of harboring terrorists and telling “lies” to the United States.
“The United States does not plan to spend the $255 million in [Fiscal Year] 2016 Foreign Military Financing for Pakistan at this time,” a National Security Council official told Fox News on Monday.
The official added, “The president has made clear that the United States expects Pakistan to take decisive action against terrorists and militants on its soil, and that Pakistan’s actions in support of the South Asia Strategy will ultimately determine the trajectory of our relationship, including future security assistance.”
The Trump administration will continue to “review Pakistan’s level of cooperation,” the official said.”
———————-
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And Pakistan isn’t happy about it.
http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-pakistan-trump-tweet-20180101-story.html
“Pakistan lashed out Monday after President Trump accused its leaders of “lies & deceit” and suggested the United States would withdraw financial assistance to the nuclear-armed nation it once saw as a key ally against terrorism.
U.S. Ambassador David Hale was summoned to the Foreign Ministry to discuss the president’s statement, U.S. Embassy spokesman Richard Snelsire said. Pakistan lodged a strongly worded protest and asked for clarification about Trump’s comments, according to two foreign office officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, called a Cabinet meeting for Tuesday and a meeting of the National Security Committee on Wednesday to discuss Trump’s New Year’s Day tweet.
It was the president’s latest broadside against Pakistan after a speech in August in which he demanded its leaders crack down on the safe havens enjoyed by Taliban militants fighting U.S.-backed forces in neighboring Afghanistan.”
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Jonah Goldberg had a funny Tweet about Pakistan yesterday morning:
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Chas’s prediction for 2018:
Next December they will be discussing the Muller investigation into Russian collusion into the election. There will be no evidence, but lots of talking heads discussing the Fake News.
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Those are some good links, AJ. Thanks for nothin’, media. You get a collective F-minus for the year (to continue your years-long streak). Yeah yeah, with a few exceptions…. Speaking of which, the WSJ link refers to a piece by Glenn Greenwald that’s worth reading. He’s far from a Trump man. But he’s a real journalist. Remember those? It’s worth reading the article of his the Journal referred to: https://theintercept.com/2017/12/09/the-u-s-media-yesterday-suffered-its-most-humiliating-debacle-in-ages-now-refuses-all-transparency-over-what-happened/
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Rickey has left us to fight with Brit Hume on Twitter . . . . I saw that exchange, Rickey! 🙂
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Bigger fish to fry ?
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It’s a couple weeks old, but John MacArthur’s eulogy at R.C. Sproul’s memorial service was moving and fascinating, including his account of some behind-the-scenes discussions after the unfortunate publication of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together statement. MacArthur quotes Sproul as declaring to some of the document’s signers, “This has to do with whether or not you are saved!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hikyZE5Mj9k
Sproul was a modern giant of the faith.
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Michelle, We had fun. I made friends with one Trumpkin over football. However the highlight of the weekend was that both Kevin D. Williamson and Valerie Adams retweeted one of my Tweets. I think I am now as addicted to Twitter as is Trump.
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It. Just. Gets. Worse.
http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/01/abedin-forwarded-state-passwords-to-yahoo-before-it-was-hacked-by-foreign-agents/
“Huma Abedin forwarded sensitive State Department emails, including passwords to government systems, to her personal Yahoo email account before every single Yahoo account was hacked, a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of emails released as part of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch shows.
Abedin, the top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, used her insecure personal email provider to conduct sensitive work. This guarantees that an account with high-level correspondence in Clinton’s State Department was impacted by one or more of a series of breaches — at least one of which was perpetrated by a “state-sponsored actor.”
The U.S. later charged Russian intelligence agent Igor Sushchin with hacking 500 million Yahoo email accounts. The initial hack occurred in 2014 and allowed his associates to access accounts into 2015 and 2016 by using forged cookies. Sushchin also worked for the Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital, which paid former President Bill Clinton $500,000 for a June 2010 speech in Moscow.
A separate hack in 2013 compromised three billion accounts across multiple Yahoo properties, and the culprit is still unclear. “All Yahoo user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft,” the company said in a statement.”
—————————
“Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, regularly forwarded work emails to her personal humamabedin@ yahoo.com address. “She would use these accounts if her (State) account was down or if she needed to print an email or document. Abedin further explained that it was difficult to print from the DoS system so she routinely forwarded emails to her non-DoS accounts so she could more easily print,” an FBI report says.
Abedin sent passwords for her government laptop to her Yahoo account on Aug. 24, 2009, an email released by the State Department in September 2017 shows.
Long-time Clinton confidante Sid Blumenthal sent Clinton an email in July 2009 with the subject line: “Important. Not for circulation. You only. Sid.” The message began “CONFIDENTIAL… Re: Moscow Summit.” Abedin forwarded the email to her Yahoo address, potentially making it visible to hackers.”
——————–
And yet Comey and company saw no crimes here?
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Vastly amused the right have discovered falling unemployment rates and the rising stock market. Both have been happening since approx 2010. A bit late but welcome to the booming American economy since 2010.
Of course prior to the Trump presidency, many on the right denied the legitimacy of the unemployment rate. The right maintained the existence of a large cadre of uncounted unemployed. Google “are unemployed rates valid” . A plethora of links mostly pre-Trump will earnestly explain why unemployed rates aren’t valid. Now of course the rates are valid.
So in 2017, the American right discovered unemployment rates are valid and the economy is in good shape. We can add this to their new found distrust in law enforcement. If this was 2015, you would think they were Obama supporters
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My economist friend will grudgingly admit Krugman deserves the prize. (its not a nobel rather a prize awarded by the swedish central bank in memory of Alfred Nobel). In fairness to Krugman, his prediction was based on Trump actually implementing his populist agenda.
I do see an economic slowdown in the next year. First simply because it is time. Recessions usually occur about 8 years apart and last about two years. The last 6-8 years have been steady economic growth (a fact the republicans tried gard to ignore) and thus its time. The trigger will probably be the implementation of Trump’s first budget. The spending cuts won’t be u implemented til late this year but the withdrawal of federal funds will slow the economy. Now some will claim the tax cuts will replace the federal funds in the economy. The error is in assuming these tax cuts will go directly to the economy. I don’t see it — most of these funds will go into savings, debt mgmt or overseas investment.
While I’m making predictions….the Mueller probe will continue but actual indictments based on Russian collusion probably won’t happen. Its much easier to prove perjury than to somehow explain to a jury the tangled nature of diplomacy and international finance. However Trump’s weak spot will be his own financial situation. Either his ties to DB and Russian or his tendency to engage in small time corruption at his golf courses ( or Washington hotel) may give him more difficulty than actual proven electoral collusion.
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Solar asked why the US should work with Iran….probably for similar reasons why Nixon went to China…..
The Saudis and Iran are engaged in several proxy wars in the Middle East. Currently the US (and Israel) support the Saudis but why? In Yemen the Saudis are allied with groups that include ISIS/al-queda groups which the US used to send drones after. Now the US sends drones after the group who fights the Saudis and ISIS allies. Similar events are occuring in Syria, Iraq and Bahrain. As the Americans have stuck with the Saudis, the Russians have allied themselves with Iran.
The Israelis support the Saudis because it destablizes their neighbors and it helps in their fight against Hezbollah. But the US is better off making nice with Iran if they are serious in fighting ISIS/al-queda and stablizing Iraq/Syria. As an added benefit this will marginalize Russia in the middle east.
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“Vastly amused the right have…”
I’m convinced hwesseli has this text set up in a macro on his machine. It’s the introductory text to all his posts here. 😉 Of course, it cuts both ways, but shhhhhh, don’t tell him.
Someone else must have asked why the US should work with Iran. I didn’t.
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I’ve also wondered why no one on the right is mentioning the invisible unemployed, the ones who’ve given up.
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Kizzie,
They have. But once off the books and not officially counted, they refer to it as Labor Force
Participation Rate. Which rose constantly under Obama, but has finally started ticking down under Trump.
While HRW wants us to believe it’s all Obama’s doing, the Trump Effect is very real. So real in fact that even the NYT has had to admit it, much as that pains them. Deregulation of Obama’s job and economy crushing policies and rules is having a positive effect.
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It was Trump that’s helped the economy along, despite Obama’s destruction.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/donald-trumps-impact-on-the-economy.html
“Dow 25,000 within Trump’s first term: Peter Navarro Dow 25,000 within Trump’s first term: Peter Navarro
8:40 AM ET Wed, 9 Nov 2016 | 05:08
Donald Trump has the potential to be a massive force for good for the economy.
The story of the American economy in the past eight years is one of tension between an aggressive “monetary” policy and a nonexistent “fiscal” policy.
Monetary policy has come from the Fed lowering interest rates to nearly zero in an effort to pump up the economy. This policy has led to tepid growth, and essentially run its course. There is only so much the Fed can do.
Fiscal policy is a combination of reforming the corporate tax code and government spending on big projects that will pump money into the economy and create new jobs. With Republicans now in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, the years-long standoff may be broken.”
—————————————
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/4/trump-effect-americans-positive-about-economy/
“You can call it the Trump effect. For the first time since the economic crisis, more Americans feel positive about the economy than negative about it, a Pew Research survey found.
“What a difference a year, and possibly an election, makes,” Pew reported Monday. “Nearly six-in-ten people in the United States (58%) say the economic situation is very or somewhat good, according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted Feb. 16-March 15. Last spring, 44% of the American public described the economy as good.”
It’s the most positive people have felt about the economy since 2007 — a year before the economic crisis — and only the second time that half or more of those surveyed have given the economy a thumbs-up, Pew reported.
Driving the higher scores are Republicans feelings about the economy — and their trust that President Donald Trump will improve lagging GDP growth, invest in infrastructure and tax reform, all of which will spur economic prosperity and improve job opportunities and wage growth.
About six in 10 Republicans and Democrats say economic conditions are very or somewhat good, and more than half of independents agree. The GOP’s good feelings about the economy has about doubled in the past year.”
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It’s only improved since that poll was taken.
And Obama has had nothing to do with it.
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Since those stories were written, the tax cuts have been passed, and things will pick up further.
https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/trump-economy-gdp-growth-unemployment/
“The number of people filing for unemployment benefits last week came in “unexpectedly” low. Instead of 240,000 claims, there were 236,000, which marked the third week in a row this number has dropped.
That’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. It’s just one measure, after all, and the differences aren’t huge.
Except it adds to a pile of “unexpectedly” good economic reports that have been coming out these days.
ADP reported that payrolls “unexpectedly” climbed 190,000 in November, while analysts had predicted 185,000.
Consumer confidence “unexpectedly” hit a 17-year high in November.
Labor costs “unexpectedly” fell in the third quarter while productivity surged. Economists thought costs would edge up by 0.3%.
Retail sales in October “unexpectedly” rose. Economists had expected them to be flat.
These are pulled just from headlines of the past few weeks. But the trend started almost as soon as President Trump took office.
Normally, it takes months for a new administration’s economic policies to take effect. But there was a sharp surge in business and consumer optimism, and the stock market has been on an upward trajectory, since the day Trump got elected. The IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index has been in positive territory for 15 months straight. What’s more, Trump was able to take immediate executive action on regulations, which sent a signal to businesses, markets and consumers alike.
Now it appears that overall economic growth for the entire year could be, you guessed it, “unexpectedly” high.”
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And home prices continue to rebound.
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We want the labor participation rate to go up not down. It jumped around in 2017. The November 2017 rate was a tiny bit lower than the January 2017 rate, but equal to the December, 2016 rate.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-participation-rate
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AJ was right that the labor participation rate trended downward for the first six years of the Obama Administration before flattening out near the current level in 2015 and 2016.
https://www.npr.org/2017/01/07/508600239/what-kind-of-jobs-president-has-obama-been-in-8-charts
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We’re all gonna die!
Eventually. 🙂
https://townhall.com/columnists/lawrencemeyers/2018/01/02/its-only-been-the-apocalypse-for-democrats-n2428792
“If we learned one thing this past year, it’s that the Mayans do not have a lock on failing to predict the Apocalypse. Democrats do. From the moment President Donald J. Trump hit 270 electoral votes, through net neutrality repeal and tax cuts, Democrats have predicted that the world would end.
Ever since The Day Democrats Reached Out, I’ve been watching the hilarious hyperbolic reactions to every Trump tweet, and each piece of lint that flutters through the Oval Office. The Democrat reaction to every single move by the Trump Administration amounts to, “We’re all gonna die”.
Remember the mass deportation of Mexicans? Neither do I. Yet we we’re all gonna die. My Democrat friends here in Southern Wackyfornia told me that their maids and nannies were terrified that they were going to be rounded up because Trump was a racist.
Remember the mass deportation of Muslims? Neither do I. Yet we we’re all gonna die. During the March of the Week Spectacular that occurred early in 2017, Democrats clogged airports to protest the 90-day visa hold – a policy enacted merely to ensure the safety of Americans.
Remember how Trump’s election empowered hate groups to go and beat innocent minorities, and that we were all gonna die? Neither do I. What I do remember is the leftist group ANTIFA, whose very name epitomizes the phrase “unintended irony”, beating the crap out of innocent Americans and starting riots every chance they got – oh, but usually to shut down free speech. It was so bad in Berkeley that even the Washington Post couldn’t ignore the truth.
Remember how Trump is Hitler and Steve Bannon is a white nationalist – and that we we’re all gonna die? Neither do I. I never quite understood how Trump could be Hitler given his staunch support of Israel, and having the courage to do what no other President did by acknowledging Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Meanwhile, the Left remains determined to divide the country via identity politics, and Bannon made his position clear.”
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As the NPR article indicates, the labor participation rate is only one of many measurements of employment and wages.
HRW is right that the recovery (both in jobs and in the stock market) started under Obama and continued through the end of his Administration.
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Better than it was.
http://thehill.com/opinion/finance/354541-labor-market-is-thriving-far-better-under-trump-than-under-obama
“During the Obama administration, a major reason the unemployment rate declined was that fewer people were in the labor force because what the BLS calls the labor participation rate continually declined as people gave up the search for a job or retired. For purposes of the official unemployment rate, if you have not looked for a job in the past 30 days, the BLS considers you out of the labor force.
Under President Obama, labor participation hit lows last seen in the late 1970s. So rather than a true reflection of labor market strength, the declining unemployment rate was, in great part, a reflection of the declining percentage of people actively looking for work. What we really want to see is a declining unemployment rate with a higher percentage of people working or actively looking for work, indicating a strong and growing economy.
In September, that’s exactly what we had. While the unemployment rate declined to a 16-year low, the labor participation rate rose from 62.9 percent to 63.1 percent, exceeding 63 percent for the first time in 42 months. In other words, in September, a smaller percentage of people were unemployed while the workforce expanded because a larger percentage of people were working or actively looking for work. That is very positive economic news.
An even better indicator of labor market strength than the official unemployment rate is what the BLS calls the U-6 unemployment rate, a broader measure that many economists consider the real unemployment rate. It counts people as unemployed for a year after they give up their job search, rather than just 30 days, and discounts the importance of part time jobs by counting people as unemployed who are working part time because they are unable to find full time jobs.”
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More,
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/record-95102000-americans-not-labor-force-number-grew-18-obama-took-office
” January 6, 2017 | 8:49 AM EST”
Barack Obama’s presidency began with a record number of Americans not in the labor force, and it’s ending the same way.
The final jobs report of the Obama presidency, released Friday, shows that the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased by 14,573,000 (18.09 percent) since January 2009, when Obama took office, continuing a long-term trend that began well before Obama was sworn in.
In December, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, a record 95,102,000 Americans were not in the labor force, 47,000 more than in November; and the labor force participation rate was 62.7 percent, a tenth of a point higher than in November.
The participation rate dropped to a 38-year low of 62.4 percent on Obama’s watch, in September 2015. It was only 3-tenths of a point higher than that last month.
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Someone didn’t get his second scoop of ice cream tonight:
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Uh-oh. Either the White House is completely out of ice cream or Mueller is indicting more people in the morning.
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Then followed the most demented Tweet of all:
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/948362512315056129
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Oh come on, Rick Weaver at 8:12. That’s a funny tweet. Yeah, juvenile and not presidential, but a pretty good burn, you have to say.
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OK, yes, the Hannity one is demented on various levels.
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A rare joke from Maggie Habermann
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HRW @ 2:01 If you are looking for likely causes for your predicted future economic slowdown, here is my nominee:
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DJ, If I was going to be in Los Angeles this weekend, here is where I would be:
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Jennifer Rubin is always serious:
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Ben Shapiro treats The Trump Show as a farce:
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Very Interesting. Fusion GPS speaks out and asks Congressional committees to release their testimony. Byron York agrees. I agree.
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