http://apnews.myway.com/article/20031030/D7UGJQTO0.html


runnert

 

What worked in 84 has worked once again “TAX CUTS” every time they are tried they WORK. In 1984 we had President Reagan, he had common knowledge of how tax cuts work, he had the same knowledge of another well known, bright Democrat that was President in the early 60’s and he too tried tax cuts and they worked beautiful.

Too bad more Democrats don’t follow the examples of the great JFK…

In all three cases, early 60’s, early 80’s, and now early 00’s the nay sayers cried ”The sky is falling” that tax cuts would mean higher deficits, would have consumers hording their money, business wouldn’t spend money and it would be the down turn of the economy.

In all three cases they have be proven wrong. Tax cuts boost personal earnings, personal spending, capital investments in business, research and development, and the economy and also have a special gift for those that love to spend our money in Washington, they bring MORE revenue into the government at ALL levels…

The current deficit has NOTHING to do with tax cuts and ALL to do with Washington spending too much money on social programs. It is time to balance the budget and rid ourselves of the deficits we have. You ONLY do that by cutting spending on SOCIAL programs first. There is a lot of fat in the social programs that can be cut that will allow the budget to be balanced…

Let the cutting begin…

 

Yea it is really working the laid off 750 at blue bird in Georgia last month. In the the next year and a half they will lay off 2100 at Brown and Williams Tobacco and shut down. Booming economy no doubt.

 

What economic boom???!!!

Jobs ARE NOT being created even though business is doing
better.

The IT/Tech world crashed and burned...too many jobs farmed
overseas (India,China,Vietnam) plus the H1bVisa disaster.

Be thankful you have a job because you may not have it next
month....

 

Ain't that the truth.

Personally I really haven't noticed much of an econimic boom either, more of halt on the down trend we were in. But give it some more time then we'll really be able to tell how well it works.

 

captainoblivious:

I agree.....So much of America's technical resources (PEOPLE!!!)
are being hallowed out and the jobs being farmed out...I am very bitter about what has happened to the IT world......do you realise when the Government posts unemployment numbers this DOES NOT reflect the poor souls that their unemployment benefits have
exhausted and now are not considered as part of the unemployment equation...in other words these people fall into a black hole and are not seen as human beings anymore...check out
the IT forum on Monster.com and see whats really happening to
IT people...This is a dangerous situation in my opinion.

 

I don’t see a boom either. I hope that wasn’t taken from my post. I have seen some new growth. Our orders are up where I work. We manufacture all types of electric motors.

This is not necessarily a trend or prediction but two models of motors we make go into ovens. These ovens are used for circuit boards. Not sure just what they do.

Prior to the economy going south (when the economy was roaring strong) and before 9/11 we were manufacturing approx. 100 – 150 motors per week for each of the two models. The two different ovens they are used in take approx. 12 – 16 of these motors.

I believe each Customer was building approx. 10 – 12 ovens a month. There huge ovens, approx. 15 feet in length, 6 foot tall, 6 foot wide. When the economy started crapping out we went down to approx. 50 motors per week.

After 9/11 absolutely nothing for about 1 – 1 ˝ years. One of the customers is local and laid off approx. 50% of the work force.

About 6 months ago they started ordering again, in the neighborhood of 50 – 70 motors a week. Last month they both put in blanket orders for a year of 200 – 250 motors a week. The one local customer is back to 100% of their work force (approx. 60 employees) as of 1 – 2 months ago. They are now looking to hire an additional 20 – 30 people to keep up with new demand that “they” have blanket orders for the next year, or beginning in the first quarter of 04.

As I said, I am not stating that as some kind of trend but both these customers sale their ovens world wide with approx. 60% - 70% of sales in America. Therefore somewhere things are beginning to move, slowly yes, but they are moving in an upward trend.

Our company was flat line for about 2 years. Our last quarter (3rd quarter) saw a 25% - 30% increase in orders and we have, since about a month ago, began rehiring new employees.

One of the things I noticed at my employer is they have been making some serious capital investments in machinery for the last 3 – 5 months due in part to the tax cuts (more money in their account) and the upward trend in business…

 

01 XLT Sport:

I agree with you...When manufacturing is "hurt" that means that an adequate supply of goods is not being produced...therefore our economy suffers...then the dreaded layoffs start...here in Georgia right after 911, companies both large and small started laying off AND NOT hiring back...peoples 401k's and retirement
nest eggs were destroyed or sadly diminished...My home office was in Atlanta...the IT Consulting staff went from 150 people
to 3 or 4...thats right, about 4 people left.....thats economic death.
When Lockheed Aircraft won the new big boy military jet contract
they were SWAMPED with from 1000-10000 resumes a week for technical jobs...It is not unusual for layed off professional IT people to send out 500-1000 resumes and only get a few interviews...It used to be in America that if you went to school and tried hard to succeed and applied yourself everyday developing your technical skills, you'd always have a good job...
Well.....THAT FICTION IS NO LONGER VALID.....

 

About 3 months ago I went to the local Circuit City to look for some some computer parts...I ran into a well dressed middle age man also looking at computer stuff...we struck up a nice conversation...about 15 minutes into the conversation he says "do you know what I'm going to do when
I leave this store"?...I said "no, I don't know, what are you going to do"...he said that he was going to blow his brains out there in his truck right on the Circuit City parking lot...I felt my neck hairs
just stand up straight....this guy was really hurting inside...I said lets talk please, I could not live with myself I I didnt try to reach out to this guy...it turns out he worked for a major Telecom
company in Atlanta (remember all that stuff in the national news?)...he got layed off...his 401k went from about $300,000 to ZERO!!!!he felt worthless as a man, he could not support his family, his savings totally lost due to corrupt top management, he felt that he would have more value to his family DEAD (insurance)....we talked a long time...I encouraged him to try some specific things to help himself...told him that I cared about him as a human being ...we parted company...each day I worriedly checked the local news hoping that he did not kill himself...Thank god he did not!.

The moral here is please love your family and friends, EVERYDAY...help any lost soul you can for one
day your own pain may start to push you over the edge....and you better pray that another human being is standing there reaching out his hand out to you...no matter what religion, culture, race or lanquage.

So you see this is what unemployment can do to good people.

 

A very somber story above. Ok..Here is the deal with the economy. As with every other economic down turn we have been through, Job creation has been the last area to recover. Remember how fast it fell in 2000. I think we are going to see things over the new few quarters take off. Are we going to have the increcible time of the late 90s...maybe; maybe not. Companies are starting to be profitable again. Companies are starting to hire again. We will see good times again. Look at the stock market. It has grown a lot this year. Tax cuts were the jolt of electricity we needed to get things going. Now it is up to us.

 

Excellent post Georgia_Moon, and a real stand up thing to do to try and help another person. A lot of people would have walked off so as to not be bothered.

I hear you about high tech jobs and a lot of them going overseas. Cheap labor, no benefits, or very little benefits for those filling jobs overseas. I am a capitalist at heart and believe in it but I think Corporate America is doing more harm to themselves in the long run.

Corporate America for the past 10 – 20 years has really changed. There is no long term planning anymore, no studying or researching what today’s decision will have on them or their share holders. It is all short term thinking now days.

I wonder if it is because many in Corporate America are just brain dead or what? It is as though they only look quarter to quarter to how profits are going to be affected.

When you stop and think about it, they, Corporate America is screwing themselves more so then those that have built them up which is you, me and all the others here.

Yes, you and I and others will be affected first, but who do they think is going to buy their product if many of us are out of work, or have very reduced income due to pay freezes, pay cuts, reduction of benefits etc?

They sure as hell will not make the kind of profit they do here if their only customers are from overseas where they have outsourced much of the work. Do you think those in China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, or other low wage, low income countries can actually afford computers, big screen TV’s, cars, boats, appliances etc?

Hell no they can’t. Therefore I see one of two things happening in the future. One, those, overseas, that are producing many things with little pay will get a taste for “wanting” nice things and will begin demanding more pay, better benefits etc. as that happens and it will happen many years down the line will increase cost to business here.

Second, as people here in America are not able to afford the things we do today begin to cut back on the things we buy and do will reduce profits to Corporate America and it will hurt them dearly.

To bad they don’t practice what Henry Ford preached, forgive me because I don’t know the exact quote but he believed that in order to sale his product and make a profit he first had to sale it at an affordable price. He also knew and preached that in order to sale his product he had to have consumers that had the money to pay for it so he paid them enough in wages they could afford to buy what they were building…

Corporate America has lost touch and unless they figure it out in the next 5 years or so they will be lost and screwed for many upon many of years to come…

It is true: ”What goes around, comes around” we are getting ours now, but Corporate America will get theirs, hopefully it won’t be to late…

 

pepatrick:

Your comments are solid and reasonable and suggest a thread of hope.

You got a nice looking truck pepatrick.

 

Gentlemen:

We live in a competitive society, one where competition is the name of the game. In any game, there are winners and losers, and in the US, those that come out on the short end (for whatever reason) get to start over doing something else.

There are no guarantees. I have been there. I have been laid off. I have had to change careers; and industries. There are genuinely hurting people out there.

But this is not eastern Europe, this is not the middle East, this is not 1933 or even 1973 or 1983. This recession we have had has been tough, but really not that tough. The bubble of the .com economy has burst, get over it. Our "booming economy" of '97-2000 had an awful lot to do with the Enrons, Tyco, Worldcoms and others (yes I worked for a company that went bankrupt largely due to the sleaze of the CEO). It also had a lot to do with a lot of silliness about how internet companies didn't need to obey the same business rules as the rest of the mortal world.

So, who do we blame? Business cycles happen, although under the conservatives Reagan and Bush we expanded for longer than any previous period in our history. After a short retreat in the early '90s, a conservative Congress forced a liberal President to toe the line on spending, and in the long period since the last really major recession (at the end of the Carter Admin and the beginning of the Reagan admin--oh heck, most of the '70s) we forgot some fundamentals like accounting and a profitable business plan...Get over it. Those "good times for a few years up to about 2000 were not particularly well founded, and they started to unravel in 2001. Ken Lay actually had whole floors of his operation dedicated to deceiving stock analysts into thinking that their electronic energy trading schemes were legit.

The media wants us to believe that Bush got us into our economic problems, but Bush started to try to fix the problems immediately when he started. 01 XLT Sport has it right; keeping taxes low was a goal of JFK, and was a major reason that the 60's were a major expansion of our economy. The Vietnam war cost so much, and Johnson did not want to expose its cost to the public, so when it finally came home to roost, the entire world economy went haywire for a decade (the '70s, the collapse of Bretton Woods, stable exchange rates, etc...)

But I digress. The jobs will start coming back; are starting back. Quit whinning and find a way to make some bucks. An education has never been a guarantee of a nice living, but rather it is a way to boost your POTENTIAL productivity.

Just my opinion. Flame away...

 

TexasSteve:

Good post…

Reading it made me hungry for some chicken fried steak. GOD you guys down there in Texas have the best freaking chicken fried steak I have ever had, and the BIGGEST…

 

TexasSteve:
[flame suit on]
I liked your post until "Quit whinning and find a way to make some bucks. An education has never been a guarantee of a nice living"...where in the hell do you get off here...no one is whining period...I'm a Nam vet, paid my damn dues to society, put myself through college....did my best to help others...earned my own way...and yes I am a highly skilled computer security engineer that has sent out 600 resumes and got only a few interviews.
My point was that the IT world has been badly hurt after 911.
[flame suit off]