I hope they get it right. . . amjad hourani

I think the increased exports effort is focused on the exchange rates with China, whose currency they keep artificially low versus the dollar.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/world/asia/05diplo.html?ref=business

The aid to states is about $125 billion short. The states need money to restore jobs this year and carry them through next year.

Don’t see any followup to the president SOTU mention of tax incentives for those companies who bring jobs back to the US.

NAFTAshocks continue.

Once again, too little too late of course.

If the rethugs filibuster this should go through reconciliation. It is clearly within the rules for handling it there.

Scott Brown signaled no jobs bill on his watch in his presser today. Said the stim didn’t create a single job.

I certainly hope Love-ME-Please Barack gives Republicans the opportunity to put some of their good ideas into the pending jobs bill. They worked magic on the first stimulus, and it was, gosh, almost bipartisan.

Barack certainly wouldn’t want to act UNILATERALLY, without Republican cover in case someone yells at Your principles ARE MY principles Obama.

Congress can’t exactly pass a bill changing the exchange rate with the yuan.

Well, he IS the President now. So we should pay attention.

Yep. At least the last prez had to serve part of his senate term before he became prez.

Perhaps they could pass a tariff on all Chinese imports that floated with the real difference between the yuan’s pegged rate and the rate it would likely have if it floated. All the revenue could go to creating jobs in the US.

Opps.Walmart would veto that. I forgot they SCOTUS recently granted them veto power.

If the GOP wants to filibuster this bill, then make them actually do so 24/7.

This is a bill that could break them.

That would also be against WTO rules too.

As I said in another post jobs created will be on a small scale if your looking at either bill coming out of the Congress.

Without a re-write of NAFTA and pushing back the WTO, there is only so much they can do without the Republicans vilifying them. You also have to make it Centrist enough for a few Republicans will vote for it that wanna look like they created jobs back home.

Also any bill that has “Rebuild America” in it and the total sum doesn’t add up to 2.2 TRILLION, its woefully SHORT.

There doesn’t seem to be any bipartisan support for any of this, at least not confirmed, and with #41 Scott Brown set to be seated today, it’s unclear how much of this can actually move under normal Senate rules.

unless powwow is wrong (and i’ve never known powwow to be wrong on congressional procedure), the dems can pass their agenda with a simple majority, so long as they are willing to LET the republicans filibuster (i actually think it would only take calling the republican’s bluff) according the rules that now exist and when the filibuster is over (the rules place limits on it, as do the physical demands of filibustering), the dems can pass their bills by simple majority.

that the dems insist on being able to prevent a filibuster via a 60 vote required cloture is just plain stupid. unless the dems have no intention of passing their bills and instead are going through the motions in an elaborate attempt at political theater to convince the base they “tried.”

http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/01/28/tom-udall-on-fixing-the-senate-weve-gotten-ourselves-into-a-box/
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/02/03/republicans-seek-to-prove-that-the-senate-is-completely-broken-again/

It would be interesting to learn, the range of small-business exports from the US and exports from the US in general. The figures behind the ‘jobs agenda’ plan should explain what exports it is that we are going to suddenly start doing en masse, and how it is that the government is going to resuscitate manufacturing in the US.

Tax Incentives to Spur Immediate Job Growth: This includes the job creation tax credits and the “carry-back” tax credit for small business capital investments.

Tax cuts convince employers to hire provided they have customers the problem is no customers.

damn. maybe i should post a diary on a proposal for how “Tea Party Democrats can win in upcoming Democratic primaries” that was given in dallas last weekend.

i think it possibly may make more sense than what the dems are proposing. yikes!

Last I looked, total exports were about 10% of GDP and that included service sector exports, like movies. (I’ll verify the # if you want to be sure.) U.S. small biz exports very little, although my late friend’s mfg business in VT was a rare example of a small biz that does export.

If the Dems had stones they would force the GOP to vote against a real jobs bill. In this jobs environment we can pass any kind of jobs bill we want but the Dems lack the the guts.

11.5%, or $1663.4/14463.4, Table 1.1.5 here. pdf

Dumbocrats with spines. That rarest of creatures.

thanks. love having the numbers and links!

My secret deal to talk about a real forecast once/qtr is moving along. Not final yet, but looks like it’ll happen. It may also give me some more tools to do charts and stuff. Keep tuned.

wouldn’t we just import from one of the other asian tigers if chinese imports became more expensive (via change in exchange rates)?

Either the dems fix 10% unemployment by November or they can be the minority party and Rahm’s Center Dem strategy will be discredited.
Dems become the minority party in the House I think we can force a vote to get rid of Nancy. Harry probably won’t survive the election.

Labor costs in Tigers well above those in China, China is a lot larger in capacity, meaning they couldn’t produce the difference in the near term. And remember, China is only to happy to accumulate reserves, as it makes them invulnerable to external pressure.

Bingo! There is no incentive to hire, if you have no customers, and no sales. That simple. Tax cut away. It won’t make any diff.

rock and roll!

(i’ve been going through the NIPA excel files, attempting to do some basic analysis, but finding it much harder than other gov data — probably because i don’t understand the subtleties of all the different items and terms (what they are, how they are calculated, etc) the oecd data by contrast was a piece of cake.)

Jane had a post up a day or two ago asking who should replace Reid as majority leader, Schumer or Durbin. It took me until tonight to figure out who it should be. Schumer of course, since it is now a rule that the D majority leader loses his seat at the next election. Would love to get rid of my pompous Wall St. whore senator.

If you find OECD data easier to use, don’t they have data on the U.S.?

Hopefully we can convince the Dems the middle path is the path to nowhere.

Too late for that.

For this election in November but I want the Blue Dog way discredited after the election in November when we elect a new Minority Senate leader and House Speaker.
I want our people in charge not another bunch of surrender monkeys like Harry and Nancy.

Thanks David, for yet another good read. Albeit, quite a sad one.

Tax credits? For small businesses? Who can’t afford to hire, because no one is buying their products? And the banks aren’t lending to keep the doors open for payroll, or anything else?

That’s a loser. Give them CASH!!!! To HIRE! Govt. supported payroll help, NOW, to hire at least SALES people. A year’s worth of salary, for every employee . . . . let’s talk about 800 Billion Dollars for small business payrolls!

Small business lending enhancements? The banks are not lending!!!! Despite the trillion or so they got in TARP!

I won’t go on . . . others have said it better . . .

Too little, too late . . . just enough to look pretty, but not threaten corps and their hierarchy, or Wall St.

However, The Wall FUCKING TANKED today, due to lack of jobs!!! It’s starting to catch up, the bullshit rhetoric with the hard core reality at hand, for the masses, for the small businesses, for the corps.

No jobs? DepressionVille hard core by or before ’11.

US unemployment by county for the past two years.

yeah, i remember stiglitz talking about that last year (the issue of china and other countries deciding to accumulate reserves in order to provide protection from having to ever go to imf — as some countries, such as indonesia had to during asian financial crisis.

galbraith has an additional theory that re china (don’t know if he thinks it applies anywhere else). iirc, it’s that they are trying to develop, industrialize and move people from rural to cities very very quickly (as these things usually go) and accumulation of reserves is a way to control internal aggregate demand (limits personal consumption so that there is more room for gov directed infrastructure, etc spending). that was a bad retelling, i’ll try to find the reference and get it right at some point. includes a kinda amusing story about his time working in china on economic dev for some un org and what he did to try to convince them, in 1996 i think, not to deregulate their financial system. they didn’t and were very glad of the fact the next year as it protected them somewhat from the financial crisis of 1997-8.

….

i have the hazy memory of skimming an essay recently that i though talked about how china exports to the usa had lots of third country content. but i couldn’t find it with a quick look. maybe i dreamed it or am misremembering. but the impression i got from it was why i asked about import replacement from other non-china countries if there was an exchange rate change. will try to either find the reference or clear my mind of it’s clutter.

i was looking at oecd data for health care stats (costs, usage rates and outcomes). i think my problem with nipa data was the economic terms and my ignorance of what they all mean exactly (not the format or anything like that).

these are the ones i downloaded (was trying to be semi-comprehensive, maybe that was a mistake. but i see that there are reference manuals. probably should take a look at them. i got stymied at i think the third item i wanted to calc.).

http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/DownSS2.asp?3Place=Y&3Place=N

Enough with the #$@*#^!!& tax credit incentive BS already. Kee-Ryst! No business of any kind is going to hire anyone or otherwise create any job in the midst of a downturn that they wouldn’t have hired/created anyway. What is lacking is the D word: Demand.

You don’t hire employees to have them service customers you don’t have, make products that you can’t sell or sell things that no one is buying. Tax credits for businesses is just more Reagan-era trickle down voodoo economic uncomposted fertilizer.

If the government wants to create jobs (and they should), it should do it directly. Put people to work. There is much to be done. But tax credits? No. They’re based on the idea that the house of cards is coming back, that what we are in now is an aberration. Neither is true.

Read JK Galbraith’s latest interview and digest the entire thing. (See James K. Galbraith: “There Is No Return To Self-Sustaining Growth”)

A jobs bill? Yes. A Reagan redux tax credits bill from Democrats? No. I’d gladly assist Scott Brown in killing the thing myself if that’s any significant part of what it is to be…because it won’t freaking work!

Government should go deeply into hock to put the unemployed to work in building the infrastructure and structure for a new industrial capacity.

The US should pull out of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq to make it easier to invest in a peacetime economy.

Ceasing funding for Israel will relieve most of the political pressures that support and encourage asymmetrical threats to US domestic security.

Wall Street will not allow this to happen. Finance will probably kneecap any sort of cure to Citizens’ United. We need to be looking into strategic alliances with populist conservatives on issues of constitutional sovereignty.

Exactly! Why is Obama pretending that now we will try bipartisanship and that will fix everything. That is what got him in this sinking boat to begin with. Baucus’s bipartisan task force that turned health care into an abortion. Bipartisan watering down of the stimulus bill in exchange for no votes. Isn’t this approaching the street definition of insanity?