Are You Better Off Than Four Years Ago?
Home sales are up and unemployment below national average.
Exactly four years ago this month, the bottom dropped out of the U.S. economy.
Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008. The next day, the Federal Reserve announced a bailout of AIG. Bad news continued to pile up almost daily, with the stock market collapsing and millions of jobs vanishing.
No single factor will define such a complex process as selection of a president, but none might be greater than the simple question: Are you better off than four years ago?
“One more month of strong home sales confirm speculation that the housing market recovery is underway,” Warren Group chief executive Timothy M. Warren Jr. said in a statement.
Are you better off than you were four years ago? Or is your financial life the same or worse? Can you credit a presidential administration with business' success or failure or is the state of business left to business leaders? Let us know in the comments section.
Dexter Liu
9:19 am on Saturday, September 29, 2012
Absolutely not! Besides the economic malaise the untold story is how disspirited the mood of our state and our nation has become in the last 3 1/2 years. The "hope & change" has become "hopelessness & despare."
OldTownie
10:44 am on Saturday, September 29, 2012
Dexter,
You sure about that? Just saw a report that consumer confidence was up to a 4 year high and the stock market hit a 5 year high just 10 days ago.
Are you one of those people that took out a 700K morgatge on a 400K house by any chance? If so, the rest of us would like to say: Thanks for nothing!
Dexter Liu
12:31 pm on Saturday, September 29, 2012
We believe in personal responsibility and have no debt. Even if we got into trouble the government is the last place we'd look for help. Some of us still believe in the "can-do" spirit and we find it deplorable so many look for a hand out. It's fundamentally immoral. The trouble with you liberals is you live in a fantasy world and believe it's OK to rob from one to pay another. You trust government to do this dirty deed. The trouble is, they have run out of our money and are borrowing 40 cents on every Dollar they spend. That bill is in the mail for your kids. They're taking us over a cliff. If $16 trillion in debt with unfunded liabilities nearly ten times are bankrupting both fed and state governments, with businesses bleeding jobs while the government declares war on them and our finacial system stressed to the point of collapse despite having seen that only 3 1/2 years ago. But for the fact Europe is worse off then us for now, we're in complete denial. All this over a back drop of government corruption, media-bias and no leadership. Our country is more divided now than ever yet they fans the flames of division. If this new normal is what you want... then I'm really sorry for you because the Titanic is sinking and you're still sipping cool-aid on the top deck.
Stanley Farak
1:03 pm on Saturday, September 29, 2012
Dexter, We to have no debt due to careful planning over the years. I have to admit though that our 401 K was in shambles near the end of the Bush (43) term. It has rebounded rather well the last 3 1/2 years thank you. Frankly We're better off financially. By the way, at least the present president put the cost of our wars in the budget, and didn't hide it!!!
Portent
12:15 am on Sunday, September 30, 2012
How about some personal responsibility for your thought process -- as well as your spelling -- Dexter? What is the moral philosophy on which you base your canard regarding people saddled with debt? Consequentialist/utilitarian, deontological/absolutist, pragmatic or some other ethical variant? If you can't answer this, you have zero credibility, or at least no more than anyone who espouses opinions absent rational justification. BTW, if you consider government to be the universal culprit in our economic plight, are you an anarchist, because that seems to be the value your comments would endorse?
Robert E
12:40 pm on Saturday, September 29, 2012
Mitt Romney's campaign is so dead, the Mormons have baptized it.
Portent
11:55 pm on Saturday, September 29, 2012
This is really wry -- and dead-on -- Robert. Kudos!
Sage
12:59 pm on Saturday, September 29, 2012
Consider this: if we paid down the deficit at $16 per second it would take 32,000 years to pay it off!!!
Robert E
6:09 pm on Saturday, September 29, 2012
Yes and if we paid it down at $1,000,000,000,000 a second it would take 16 seconds to pay it off!!! what is your point anyone can throw around random figures it proves nothing.
Sage
8:25 pm on Saturday, September 29, 2012
Do you realize how long 32,000 years is? Modern civilization isn't even 10,000 years old! A crash is coming and anyone who doesn't think so needs to look at the facts. These numbers put it in perspective, and I don't know about anyone else, but the situation is far worse than I thought. Even if we were decreasing it a reasonable rate, the public debt would take impossibly long to pay off.
BTW, http://www.usdebtclock.org/ shows the "US National Debt" INcreasing about $20,000 per second, by my eyeball estimate ...
Robert E
12:31 am on Sunday, September 30, 2012
The first thing we need to do is end the bush tax cuts it makes no sense to cut revenue when you are trying to cut debt.
Paul Silver
10:05 am on Sunday, September 30, 2012
Sage: Where was that debt money spent, and where do you think it is currently going?
Chris St Peter
7:43 pm on Tuesday, October 2, 2012
The End Is NEE!