Let’s get away from the GOP talking points about the rosy economy, and look at some alternative viewpoints linked and excerpted below.

Are we actually in a “Job Depression”?

Is it true or false that our economy in the last 5 years created only 1 million net new jobs, when our population grew far more than that? Immigration alone accounted for 8 million new people.

Some economists look at the numbers released from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and come to different conclusions than the Bush Administation, and even conclude we are in a Job Depression.

Read the excerpts and the articles linked below, for a different take on things.

The media elite are consumed with petty political battles, “The War on Christmas”, etc, while terrible things may be going on economically that truly undermine the internal security of our economy.

These alternative viewpoints are scary to the layperson like myself. They remind me that it’s been over two decades since I first became aware of the steady drumbeat of “End is Near” economic horror stories, raising warnings about our huge deficits and unemployment. The warnings died down a bit in the late nineties.

I hope the gloom and doom-sayers are no more accurate than those who, for the last 25 years, have been predicting the Second Coming as being any day now.

Paul Craig Roberts: Nuking the Economy

[snip]

If you are worried about terrorists, you don’t know what worry is.

Job growth over the last five years is the weakest on record. The US economy came up more than 7 million jobs short of keeping up with population growth. That’s one good reason for controlling immigration. An economy that cannot keep up with population growth should not be boosting population with heavy rates of legal and illegal immigration.

[snip]
Economists who look beyond political press releases estimate the US unemployment rate to be between 7% and 8.5%. There are now hundreds of thousands of Americans who will never recover their investment in their university education.

Unless the BLS is falsifying the data or businesses are reporting the opposite of the facts, the US is experiencing a job depression. Most economists refuse to acknowledge the facts, because they endorsed globalization. It was a win-win situation, they said.

[snip]
No sane economist can possibly maintain that a deplorable record of merely 1,054,000 net new private sector jobs over five years is an indication of a healthy economy. The total number of private sector jobs created over the five year period is 500,000 jobs less than one year’s legal and illegal immigration! (In a December 2005 Center for Immigration Studies report based on the Census Bureau’s March 2005 Current Population Survey, Steven Camarota writes that there were [7.9 Million] new immigrants between January 2000 and March 2005.)

[snip]

On February 10 the Commerce Department released a record US trade deficit in goods and services for 2005–$726 billion. The US deficit in Advanced Technology Products reached a new high. Offshore production for home markets and jobs outsourcing has made the US highly dependent on foreign provided goods and services, while simultaneously reducing the export capability of the US economy. It is possible that there might be no exchange rate at which the US can balance its trade.

[snip]

[WHO is Paul Craig Roberts? Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.]

SEE ALSO More Bad News on the Jobs Front, by Paul Craig Roberts

What is the Davos Group, AKA “The Party of Davos”?

The Party of Davos by Jeff Faux

The world’s movers and shakers are convening once again in January at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, the posh ski resort nestled in the Swiss Alps. Attendance is invitation-only, enforced by police barricades, razor wire and the latest high-tech military hardware to guard against terrorists, protesters and curious local citizens.

Some 2,000 people will show up to discuss the world’s problems as defined by those who own and manage the great global concentrations of wealth (Microsoft, Citigroup, Siemens, Nestlé, Nomura Holdings, Saudi Basic Industries, etc.). Their guests include prominent political leaders, international bureaucrats, academics, consultants and media pundits–with a few NGO and labor union officials sprinkled along the edges to demonstrate diversity.

Davos is not the place for secret conspiracies. More than 200 hovering journalists will dispatch to the world’s citizens breathless accounts of the chatter and charm of the masters of the economic universe.

[snip]

The crisis on the military side involves blowback from the overreach in Iraq. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld–despite their thick transnational corporate connections–have created a disaster for Davos. The war has unleashed an army of enemies of Western modernization that is making global corporations nervous. Two years ago the wiser heads at Davos were appalled at Cheney’s delusional report on the Bush Administration’s progress in turning the Middle East into a shopping mall–however much they might have sympathized with the objective. Today the mess in Iraq has revealed to Davos both the incompetence of the American governing class and the unwillingness of the American electorate to make the sacrifices necessary to act as security police for the world’s rich and powerful.

The looming economic crisis comes from the unsustainable US external debt. For more than a quarter-century, we Americans have been buying more from the rest of the world than we have been selling it, and borrowing from abroad to make up the difference. The resulting trade deficit has been a major engine of global growth under Davos’s management. But common sense and simple arithmetic tell us that even the United States cannot go on much longer spending more than it is earning.

When the day of reckoning comes, high interest rates and a falling dollar will force us Americans to rebalance our trade by cutting the price of what we sell and raising the price of what we buy, lowering real incomes. The crisis in the nation’s trade sector will be transmitted to the rest of the economy, made vulnerable by overindebted consumers, overleveraged pension funds and overpriced houses. Thanks to George W. Bush’s reckless fiscal deficits, the government will have less ability to overcome an economic crisis through borrow-and-spend, as it did in the last economic downturn. With the appetite for America’s IOUs diminishing, US politicians will have their hands full dealing with rising energy costs and the tottering finances of healthcare, education and pensions.

[snip]

Jeff Faux was the founder of and is now distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute [a pro-labor group - RM]. His latest book, The Global Class War (Wiley), was published in January.