Here comes the OFF scandal...

[Marcus Bryant]

Jobs are down. It hasn't happened in 70 years. Bush was the sitting President.

Those are all fact, not arguments.

You made the argument that the Bush administration was "responsible" for it.

If you're contesting my assertion that it's Bush' fault, then fine. Who's fault is it, then? Certainly not the Democrats. They hold neither the Whitehouse, nor either house of congress.

How about it being the result of a sustained rise in financial asset prices throughout the last half of the 1990s and its subsequent collapse due to the unsustainability of the widely optimistic scenarios implied in said prices, for starters? That certainly hit business spending which is pretty significant when it comes to job creation. Factor in a Fed raising interest rates and you had all the makings of an economic downturn. If you would like a good book I would recommend Irrational Exuberance by Robert Shiller. Also, any introductory macroeconomics text would be a good start.

Then of course there was 9/11 which introduced a great deal of uncertainty into financial asset prices and there was a rather immediate and significant reduction in employment.

Of course, I am just a "professional student". Better to remain dumb instead, I suppose.

[Samurai Jane]

Osama's? He nearly put the airline industry out of business...not just here but in Europe as well.

So true, my boss owns a travel agency and he had to let go of all his employees after 9/11.

[Marcus Bryant]

Stay with me here. We're starting at the beginning of the Bush administration. The tech bubble losses don't count, since those were on Clinton's watch, which, by the way, still managed to post positive job growth.

That's well and good but you are assuming that those effects did not continue.

I'm not going to 'stay with you' because your points are ing childish and moronic. I've only wasted this much time on you because I used to actually have some respect for you.

Good day.

[exstatic]

How about it being the result of a sustained rise in financial asset prices throughout the last half of the 1990s and its subsequent collapse due to the unsustainability of the widely optimistic scenarios implied in said prices, for starters?

The tech bust. That happened in March 2000, about 10 months before Bush took office. The fallout from that had done fell out by then.

As for Osama, 9/11 did cause the market to drop, but , it's back to where it started now. Why do businesses still not feel like spending? Could it be that they lack confidence in this adminstrations policies? Could it be that all of this deficit spending is making them jittery? The only think worse than tax and spend is don't tax and spend. Getting this rampant Federal spending under control would be a good place to start. That's not going to happen while we're occupying Iraq.

[Aggie Hoopsfan]

Where are the jobs? Howabout taking a look at where the jobs were lost:

- airline industry
- travel industry
- tourism industry
- customer support/relations jobs outsourced

The last one is about the only one you could maybe blame on our administration, and outside of banning outsourcing, I don't see how you get around that.

And if you pass legislation banning outsourcing, that kills any number of trade ventures , not to mention if push comes to shove you'd have entire corporations moving their business out of the U.S.