Do you believe that Capitalism requires 5.5% unemployment?

[suplex3000]

Do you consider unemployment bad? My friend claims that capitalism must have 5.5% unemployment to function effectively. The idea he summarized was that with unemployment lower than 5.5%, this would lead to massive inflation and that would decrease the value of wages of all the workers. Does it have any basis? This fall we had something about 10,7%? Obama was not good at solving the problem. How do you see this unemployment nowadays?

 

[The Rabbi]

Do you consider unemployment bad? My friend claims that capitalism must have 5.5% unemployment to function effectively. The idea he summarized was that with unemployment lower than 5.5%, this would lead to massive inflation and that would decrease the value of wages of all the workers. Does it have any basis? This fall we had something about 10,7%? Obama was not good at solving the problem. How do you see this unemployment nowadays?

Under Bush the unemployment rate was well below 5.5% and we never had any inflation.
Any questions?

 

[there4eyeM]

Capitalism is just a very general economic description. There is every possible permutation. Like everything else human, it depends on the will of those using it. Employment itself is not 'necessary', that is just the game we play because we have inherited it. We could imagine another way.

 

[Sonny Clark]

Do you consider unemployment bad? My friend claims that capitalism must have 5.5% unemployment to function effectively. The idea he summarized was that with unemployment lower than 5.5%, this would lead to massive inflation and that would decrease the value of wages of all the workers. Does it have any basis? This fall we had something about 10,7%? Obama was not good at solving the problem. How do you see this unemployment nowadays?

Capitalism and employment are two entirely separate entities. One has nothing to do with the other.

 

[paddymurphy]

Do you consider unemployment bad? My friend claims that capitalism must have 5.5% unemployment to function effectively. The idea he summarized was that with unemployment lower than 5.5%, this would lead to massive inflation and that would decrease the value of wages of all the workers. Does it have any basis? This fall we had something about 10,7%? Obama was not good at solving the problem. How do you see this unemployment nowadays?

Do you consider unemployment bad? My friend claims that capitalism must have 5.5% unemployment to function effectively. The idea he summarized was that with unemployment lower than 5.5%, this would lead to massive inflation and that would decrease the value of wages of all the workers. Does it have any basis? This fall we had something about 10,7%? Obama was not good at solving the problem. How do you see this unemployment nowadays?

Under Bush the unemployment rate was well below 5.5% and we never had any inflation.
Any questions?

Which unemployment rate? The u-6 rate, which according to the right is the real unemployment rate, was above 5% under bush. The actual use rate was always above 5%. Bush pushed it to 9% when he left and he owned the peak of 11% a few months after Obama took office.

 

[The Rabbi]

Do you consider unemployment bad? My friend claims that capitalism must have 5.5% unemployment to function effectively. The idea he summarized was that with unemployment lower than 5.5%, this would lead to massive inflation and that would decrease the value of wages of all the workers. Does it have any basis? This fall we had something about 10,7%? Obama was not good at solving the problem. How do you see this unemployment nowadays?

Do you consider unemployment bad? My friend claims that capitalism must have 5.5% unemployment to function effectively. The idea he summarized was that with unemployment lower than 5.5%, this would lead to massive inflation and that would decrease the value of wages of all the workers. Does it have any basis? This fall we had something about 10,7%? Obama was not good at solving the problem. How do you see this unemployment nowadays?

Under Bush the unemployment rate was well below 5.5% and we never had any inflation.
Any questions?

Which unemployment rate? The u-6 rate, which according to the right is the real unemployment rate, was above 5% under bush. The actual use rate was always above 5%. Bush pushed it to 9% when he left and he owned the peak of 11% a few months after Obama took office.

View attachment 46228

Please quote which people on the Right think the U6 is the "real" unemployment rate.
The question had to do with the UE rate being at 5.5%. Clearly under Bush it was much less than that. It rose in the Democrat-induced recession and peaked under the Democrat Obama. Try to keep up.

 

[paddymurphy]

Do you consider unemployment bad? My friend claims that capitalism must have 5.5% unemployment to function effectively. The idea he summarized was that with unemployment lower than 5.5%, this would lead to massive inflation and that would decrease the value of wages of all the workers. Does it have any basis? This fall we had something about 10,7%? Obama was not good at solving the problem. How do you see this unemployment nowadays?

Do you consider unemployment bad? My friend claims that capitalism must have 5.5% unemployment to function effectively. The idea he summarized was that with unemployment lower than 5.5%, this would lead to massive inflation and that would decrease the value of wages of all the workers. Does it have any basis? This fall we had something about 10,7%? Obama was not good at solving the problem. How do you see this unemployment nowadays?

Under Bush the unemployment rate was well below 5.5% and we never had any inflation.
Any questions?

Which unemployment rate? The u-6 rate, which according to the right is the real unemployment rate, was above 5% under bush. The actual use rate was always above 5%. Bush pushed it to 9% when he left and he owned the peak of 11% a few months after Obama took office.

View attachment 46228

Please quote which people on the Right think the U6 is the "real" unemployment rate.
The question had to do with the UE rate being at 5.5%. Clearly under Bush it was much less than that. It rose in the Democrat-induced recession and peaked under the Democrat Obama. Try to keep up.

The democrat induced recession started while Bush was President. Phew caused it to rise nada this president brought us back from the brink of a depression.

 

[midcan5]

Capitalism is whatever you want to make of it. It can be bad or good to the ideologue. For the moment I'll post a few quotes for the readers. PS there are no givens and all functioning economies today are mixes. Good cooks and good economists realize the right combinations work best.

"Market fundamentalists hold a dogmatic, quasi-religious belief in unfettered market capitalism, and therefore oppose anything that restrains the business community, be it restrictions on the use of tobacco or the emission of greenhouse gases." 'Challenging Knowledge,' an essay in 'Agnotology'

"*Capitalism is the ownership and use of the concrete but dynamic elements in a society - what is commonly known as the means of production. A capitalist is someone who produces more capital through the production of the means he owns. This necessitates the periodic reinvestment of part of the capital earned into the repair, modernization and expansion of the means. Capitalism is therefore the ownership of an abstraction called capital, rendered concrete by its ownership of the means of production, which through actual production creates new capital.... However, capitalism as conceived today tends to revolve around something called the profit motive, even though profit is neither a cause of capitalism nor at the heart of the capitalist action. Profit is a useful result of the process, nothing more. As for the ownership of the means of production, this has been superseded by their management. And yet, to manage is to administer, which is a bureaucratic function. Alternately, there is a growing reliance upon the use of capital itself to produce new capital. But that is speculation, not production. Much of the development of the means of production is now rejected as unprofitable and, frankly, beneath the dignity of the modern manager, who would rather leave such labour and factory-intensive "dirty" work to Third World societies. Finally , the contemporary idea of capitalism grandly presents "service" as its new sophisticated manifestation. But the selling of one's own skills is not a capitalist art. And most of the jobs being created by the service industries are with the exception of the high-technology sector descendants of the pre-eighteenth-century commerce in trade and services." p360 'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul

"Greenspan, the foremost champion of free markets, turned out to believe in freeing them only on the way up. On the downward slope he favored massive government intervention-by himself. After the stock bubble burst he was as good as his word, flooding the economy with credit and liquidity and driving the Feds interest rate down from 6,5 percent in May 2000 to I percent by June 2003. His reputation had barely survived the stock market crash of 2000 but took a beating during the panic of 2008 when it became clear that Emperor Greenspan had no clothes. The symbolic end of his reign came on October 23, 2008, when, testifying before a House committee, he was asked in effect how he could have been so stupid. A chastened Greenspan confessed to having made mistakes and suffered the humiliation at a congressman's hands of being compared to a Boston Red Sox first basemen whose fielding error cost the Sox the 1986 World Series. This was the end of the line, for in American culture having a sporting metaphor deployed against you is the ultimate disgrace. A richly deserved blow of course, it came far too late to save all the sorry investors who had once believed Greenspan's was the word of God." p317 'A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989-2001' by William L. O'Neill


And yet over the course of the decade the old skepticism toward business that had been born in the Great Depression and reawakened for a new generation in the Vietnam era finally began to disappear. The economic transformations of the decade would be interpreted through the framework of the free market vision. The 1970s campaigns to revive the image of capitalism among college students bore fruit in the 1980s. Universities created new centers for the study of business themes such as entrepreneurship. Students in Free Enterprise, a group started in 1975 to bring students together to "discuss what they might do to counteract the stultifying criticism of American business," thrived on small college campuses, funded by companies like Coors, Dow Chemical, and Walmart (as well as the Business Roundtable). The group organized battles of the bands, at which prizes would be doled out to the best pro-business rock anthems, helped silkscreen T-shirts with pro-capitalist messages, and created skits based on Milton Friedman's writings, which college students would perform in local elementary schools. In the workplace, the decline of the old manufacturing cities of [he North and Midwest and the rise of the sprawling suburbs of the Sunbelt metropolises marked the rise of a new economic culture, dominated by companies such as Walmart and Home Depot and Barnes & Noble." Kim Phillips-Fein ('Invisible Hands')

 

[JoeB131]

Under Bush the unemployment rate was well below 5.5% and we never had any inflation.
Any questions?

You mean other than the two recessions the guy had... But I know you don't want to talk about those.

 

[bedowin62]

Under Bush the unemployment rate was well below 5.5% and we never had any inflation.
Any questions?

You mean other than the two recessions the guy had... But I know you don't want to talk about those.

we might not "want to talk about those"
because we are more than halfway through the Democrat's SEVENTH YEAR

I swear libs are idiots and crybaby hypocrites

 

[JoeB131]

Do you consider unemployment bad? My friend claims that capitalism must have 5.5% unemployment to function effectively. The idea he summarized was that with unemployment lower than 5.5%, this would lead to massive inflation and that would decrease the value of wages of all the workers. Does it have any basis? This fall we had something about 10,7%? Obama was not good at solving the problem. How do you see this unemployment nowadays?

I think you are a bit confused.

The main theory is that you can't have full employement because that leads to inflation, but that really hasn't been true since the 1970's, where you had high inflation despite unemployment over 5.5%.

The bigger problem we are running into today is that there has been a disconnect between capital and labor. It is completely possible to have businesses that run without any people.

What we need to do is rethink the whole philosophy of having an economy based on making the few rich rather than keeping the many gainfully employed.

 

[JoeB131]

we might not "want to talk about those"
because we are more than halfway through the Democrat's SEVENTH YEAR

I swear libs are idiots and crybaby hypocrites

Yes, it's taken 7 years to get us back into shape from the damage Bush did.

And you guys want to nominate another Bush because you clearly didn't learn anything.

 

[bedowin62]

average unemployment in those European socialist democracies RIGHT NOW that the Left insists we need to emulate?

9-11%

why do left-wingers love lying to themselves?

 

[Wyatt earp]

Do you consider unemployment bad? My friend claims that capitalism must have 5.5% unemployment to function effectively. The idea he summarized was that with unemployment lower than 5.5%, this would lead to massive inflation and that would decrease the value of wages of all the workers. Does it have any basis? This fall we had something about 10,7%? Obama was not good at solving the problem. How do you see this unemployment nowadays?

Capitalism and employment are two entirely separate entities. One has nothing to do with the other.

I think he means for capitilism to be successful it requires a 5.5% unemployment anything lower causes inflation

The answer is no, in 1944 unemployment was around 1.4%

 

[Mac1958]

Economists declare that "full employment" at its optimum level is around 4.5% to 5.0% unemployment, which is a lovely example of why some economists (theorists) are nice to have around but as a rule shouldn't be sitting at the grownup table at dinner time.

When kept in their lane, economists can be very helpful. When they become pundits, they too often become theorists. These economists (theorists) think they can take a snapshot like that and have it actually mean something. When unemployment is at 5.0%, what kind of jobs are those? In what direction is quality of jobs heading? What is the economic trend globally, including commodity prices and currencies? That's just a start. Snapshots have limited value when it comes to economics.

Theorists are nice as pets, but that's about it.

.

 

[Iceweasel]

I remember someone here trying to make that case, his argument made no sense. More people working = more taxes collected and less people needing any form of handouts. How on Earth can that be bad in any way? In fact, the more people working, the tougher it is to find help so it's a seller's market. People can demand more for their time. That's the fundamental aspect of economics that liberals don't get.

 

[bedowin62]

we might not "want to talk about those"
because we are more than halfway through the Democrat's SEVENTH YEAR

I swear libs are idiots and crybaby hypocrites

Yes, it's taken 7 years to get us back into shape from the damage Bush did.

And you guys want to nominate another Bush because you clearly didn't learn anything.

except we aren't dummy

RECORD numbers on disability

13 MILLION MORE on food stamps
then when bush was in office

 

[Wyatt earp]

Under Bush the unemployment rate was well below 5.5% and we never had any inflation.
Any questions?

You mean other than the two recessions the guy had... But I know you don't want to talk about those.

The mini recession started in 1999 but you wouldn't admit it even If I proved it

 

[bedowin62]

Eurostat estimates that 23.296 million men and women in the EU-28[1], of whom 17.756 million were in the euro area (EA-19)[2], were unemployed in June 2015. Compared with May 2015, the number of persons unemployed decreased by 32 000 in the EU-28 and increased by 31 000 in the euro area. Compared with June 2014, unemployment fell by 1 448 000 in the EU-28 and by 811 000 in the euro area.

The euro area seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate was 11.1 % in June 2015, stable compared with May 2015, and down from 11.6 % in June 2014. The EU-28 unemployment rate was 9.6 % in June 2015, stable compared with May 2015 and down from 10.2 % in June 2014.

this is what the Left wants for us

 

[bedowin62]

too many on the left just love lying to themselves

so they spend their time making irrelevant posts, using statistics that are irrelevant since we don't live in a vacuum. In fact when you really look at what the Left posts it usually makes the case for the other side's point