President Trump

[AvHdB]

One thing to note, the unemployment figures claimed as a Trump effect are part of an economic cycle that started during Obama's tenure. Economists will usually tell us that economic cycles are not under the control of individual political administrations, they are pretty much inevitable. What economic policy can achieve is to alter the amplitude and frequency, but not the eradication of the cycles. The corollary of that is that, usually, it is fallacious for any administration to claim, for itself, perceived cyclical economic benefits that happen on its watch because the cycles, and there are several, take place over longer terms than a single administration.

This is true and well put.

While I have a strong dislike for Obama and his legacy, he inherited a mega mess that was the results of W. Bush. It took a long time for the economic disaster pendulum (cycle) to move back to a balanced situation.

[2tallbill]

No, it doesn't change things. If it did the charts would look different.

For your suggestion to be on point we would have to expect that the sudden dip in 2008 did not happen - see chart one. What we see there is a sudden change in the employment pattern and one that has continued. What actually happened in 2008 was a large increase in unemployment, one that has not reversed. If the economy returned to normal then we would expect there to be a change back up as the unemployed moved back into employment.

Retirees are not part of the labour force and so do not figure into the labour participation rate (and also, of course, not in the headline employment figures). Also discarded from the figures are children and a few other classes. The most significant part of those uncounted inthe headline figure is the 'discouraged'. The assumption is made that anyone who has not found work after a few months, IIRC six, is no longer part of the labour force and is therefore not counted as unemployed. Not being counted in the headline employment figures is the biggest single fudge in the figures and what makes the participation rate numbers so important.

The change in the workforce participation is due to two factors:
1) a general increase in population
2) fewer people, as a proportion of the labour, force working

The labour force participation rate is about the proportions, not the absolute numbers. We should expect, in a healthy economy, that the participation rate should remain roughly consistent - in terms of the first chart, the line should be flat(ish) and horizontal. Of course, cyclical effects on the economy will cause variations but the trend toward the horizontal should be clear. You can see that the trend since 2008 is for a big drop, a drop that actually started years before 2008 but that year was an inflection point. Over this period we have been told that the economy has been doing great - it hasn't.

As the economy grows the number of jobs should increase in order to absorb the increase in working age population -it isn't. The second chart shows that the absolute number of people of working age who are not working is increasing. That's why the second chart is more worrying than the first because a society with too many people not working tends to become unstable. It is likely that this instability is already being manifested and will get worse.

The best measuring stick for unemployment isn't U3 unemployment which
as you've pointed out doesn't take into consideration underemployment,
long term discouraged workers and people who have part time jobs but
want full time jobs.

U6 unemployment while not perfect is a better measurement tool.

"The percentage of Americans 16 or older who are in the labor force is just 62.7%, well below the 66.4% rate that prevailed before the Great Recession. Retiring baby boomers help explain much of the decline, but the share of Americans in the prime working years - ages 25 to 54 — who are working still hasn’t fully recovered to precession levels."
https://www.marke*snip*ch.com/story/the-real-us-unemployment-rate-reached-a-17-year-low-2018-06-01

[Contrarian]

Secret Service arrests contractor accused of murder. 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/arrest-made-outside-white-house/

[Tom Cat]

I can't remember during my lifetime, the U.S. making historic economic growth as has taken place over the first 500 days of the Trump presidency.
The United States is set to be the world's biggest energy producer. 
There's talk of a 4.8 percent economic growth rate for the 2nd quarter.
It's truly great to live in the United States with a President that actually is working for America.

[2tallbill]

Whoops,

If the Dems don't get at least 80% of the black vote they stop winning
elections.

Voters Think Young Blacks Doing Better Under Trump Than Obama

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey shows
that 32% of Likely U.S. Voters believe life for young black Americans has
gotten better since Trump’s election.

But in March 2014, just 16% said life for young black Americans had gotten better since Obama’s election five-and-a-half years earlier.  By July 2016 in Obama’s final year in office, only 13% thought life was better for young blacks.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/social_issues/voters_think_young_blacks_doing_better_under_trump_than_obama



Black unemployment rate hits a record low
As the overall unemployment rate continues to fall — the lowest since 2000
it's also shrinking the gap between black and white unemployment. It is
the narrowest on record.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/01/news/economy/black-unemployment-rate-record-low/index.html

[Contrarian]

Illegal who thought he was safe in a “sanctuary city” to be deported.

Get the latest on New York businesses, arts, sports, dining, style and more. Sign up for the New York Today Newsletter.
He Delivered Pizza to an Army Base in Brooklyn. Now He Faces Deportation.
Food delivery. Sanctuary. Those are often the anchors for the more than half a million undocumented immigrants who live and work in New York City.
But an incident at the United States Army base in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, last week has called those foundations into question, and provoked new tension in the city’s battle with federal immigration authorities over protections for immigrants without legal status.
Pablo Villavicencio Calderon, 35, an undocumented immigrant, was making a delivery from a brick-oven pizza restaurant in Queens to the Army base next to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on Friday before lunchtime.
According to his wife, Sandra Chica, he presented a New York City identification card, as he had done in the past. The card, provided through a program called IDNYC, was supposed to give undocumented immigrants a method of proving their identification when dealing with city agencies, including the schools system and the Police Department, neither of which is allowed to ask about immigration status.
But on that day, Ms. Chica said, it was not enough for the military police officer on duty, who said Mr. Villavicencio needed a driver’s license, which he did not have. A background check revealed an open order of deportation from 2010. Military personnel detained him and called Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, who took him into custody, an official for the immigration agency said.
He is scheduled to be deported to Ecuador next week, his wife said.
“The arrest of Pablo with a municipal ID is sending shock waves throughout the immigrant community because they were told they would have some form of living in this city without harassment,” Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and a Democrat, said at a news conference on Wednesday outside the Army base. “Now everyone with those IDs are afraid what will happen.”
The Trump administration made it clear from the outset that all immigrants living illegally in the United States would be subject to deportation; there would no longer be priorities emphasizing the deportation of dangerous criminals.
According to Catherine SantoPietro, a spokeswoman for the Army command at the base, only a Department of Defense or military identification is acceptable for entry. Otherwise, visitors must get a day pass, which requires an on-site background check.
“Upon signing a waiver permitting a background check, Department of the Army Access Control standard for all visitors, an active Immigration and Customs Enforcement warrant was discovered on file,” Ms. SantoPietro said in a statement.
The episode exposed the tenuous protection undocumented immigrants have in New York, despite that fact that as a so-called sanctuary city, it limits cooperation with immigration officials.
And using an IDNYC card can have unintended consequences, acting as a signal that a holder is undocumented. “Because when you show that, you are telling the other people, ‘Listen, I don’t have a driver’s license,’” Ms. Chica said.
“Is this city, state and nation safer because they took a pizza delivery guy off the street?” asked Justin Brannan, a Democratic city councilman representing Brooklyn, at the news conference.
Mr. Adams wondered why the base policy had appeared to shift, since according to Mr. Villavicencio he had delivered without incident before. “That is why, as a sanctuary city, we need to be clear for those federal locations, what are you requiring of people entering the location,” Mr. Adams said.
But State Senator Martin J. Golden, a Republican member of the Senate Committee on Veterans, Homeland Security and Military Affairs, applauded the actions of the military police, saying that he “would expect nothing less from the Fort Hamilton commander and its dedicated personnel who have committed their lives to protecting our citizens and country.”
Mr. Villavicencio knew that he was constantly at risk of deportation, his wife said. He had no criminal record, according to a spokeswoman for ICE, as the immigration agency is known. He was granted a voluntary departure order from an immigration judge in 2010, but did not leave. That made him a fugitive.
Mr. Villavicencio married Ms. Chica, 38, a naturalized citizen from Colombia, five years ago, she said. They live in Hempstead, on Long Island. They have two daughters. In February, Ms. Chica said, her husband applied for a green card as the spouse of a United States citizen, but had not heard back.
He had been working for the past eight months for Nonna Delia’s, a brick-oven pizza restaurant in College Point, Queens. Doing a delivery job without a driver’s license “was his mistake,” his wife said.
A manager at the restaurant, reached by phone on Wednesday, would say only that Mr. Villavicencio “is a good guy,” but did not want to comment further because “the family is suffering.” The restaurant is nearly an hour away from the base, and the manager acknowledged that it had delivered there in the past.
Ms. Chica said the personnel at the base had still accepted his food delivery. When she went to pick up his car, the two large containers designed to hold the food were empty, she said.
Follow Liz Robbins on Twitter: @nytlizrobbins
RELATED COVERAGE
In a ‘Sanctuary City,’ Immigrants Are Still at Risk Feb. 27, 2018
A Game of Cat and Mouse With High Stakes: Deportation Aug. 3, 2017
Get the full New York Times experience
                                                            .

[shakespear]

He was granted a voluntary departure order from an immigration judge in 2010, but did not leave.

That happens between 85-90% of the time. 

Our immigration laws DESPERATELY need a re-write. 

[Contrarian]

He was granted a voluntary departure order from an immigration judge in 2010, but did not leave.

That happens between 85-90% of the time. 

Our immigration laws DESPERATELY need a re-write.

In the meantime one by one President Trump is enforcing the law and ejecting law breakers.

Cutting off funding to “sanctuary cities” would be long overdue. 

[AvHdB]

I understand there is a pizza place that needs a delivery boy. Confederate is this something for you?

[Contrarian]

I understand there is a pizza place that needs a delivery boy. Confederate is this something for you?

And I understand there’s a bar that needs an illiterate dyslexic drunk as a busboy. Your dream job is waiting Av.

[Contrarian]

The Inspector General report castigates Comey. Of course there are two sides to every story.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus and a key Trump ally on Capitol Hill, said, “It appears at least five individuals that were involved in the Hillary Clinton investigation went on to investigate aspects of Russia, and when you have bias associated with that, it’s deeply troubling.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/world/national-security/inspector-general-blasts-comey-says-others-at-fbi-showed-willingness-to-take-official-action-to-hurt-trump/2018/06/14/5fc091ee-6f1a-11e8-afd5-778aca903bbe_story.html

[Tom Cat]

This coming Wednesday I will be taking my daughter to attend the Trump rally in Duluth mn. The Trump organization has just informed that the venue has changed to accommodate more people.
The media would have you believe that the president is not well liked or popular, but he is a rockstar!

[Lord of the Dance]

This coming Wednesday I will be taking my daughter to attend the Trump rally in Duluth mn. The Trump organization has just informed that the venue has changed to accommodate more people.
The media would have you believe that the president is not well liked or popular, but he is a rockstar!

Good for you Tom Cat. Sounds like one of those unorthodox-but-fun bonding opportunities for you and your daughter. Trump is definitely more popular than certain entities would have you believe. 

[Contrarian]

Kim Jong-un criticized for meeting with nation that has committed genocide of 60 million. 

https://babylonbee.com/news/kim-jong-un-criticized-for-meeting-with-nation-that-has-killed-60-million-babies/

[Tom Cat]

Will the United States cash in?

[AvHdB]

This is an interesting observation. It is from S. Hersh. Part of the problem is true journalists such as Hersch are declining.

Asked, if government lies still make him as angry as in his first days of his career, Hersh replied: „It is more than being upset about lying – it’s about the reluctance of us in the press to hold the men and women who run the world's governments to the highest possible standards. We have a President in America today who lies repeatedly about the most meaningless of information, but he must learn that he cannot lie about the intelligence relied upon before authorizing an act of war. There are those in the Trump administration that understand this, which is why I learned the information I did. If this story creates even a few moments of regret in the white house it will have served a very high purpose.“


The above from the > https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article165906452/The-Fog-of-War.html <

[andrewfi]

A few years ago I started referring to news media as news/entertainment media because it is clear that news is no longer about journalism but rather has become a part of the entertainment media, designed to entertain and titillate rather than to inform.

There are several reasons for this but none of them are good. All of them tend to force information down the list of priorities.

People such as Hersch have no place in modern mass media. Nowadays, investigative journalism has moved out of mass media and into a large fringe of independent news sites, blogs, and video channels. Many of the people I looked up to as being leading lights of true journalism now find their home on such sites. Sadly though, these people are often dependent upon larger platforms to reach their audience. Platforms such as Facebook, Youtube, Wordpress, Blogger, or Twitter, all of whom exercise an editorial role by banning and shadow banning sources that they do not like or agree with.

[AvHdB]

Bear in mind S. Hersch is no spring chicken.

YouTube has morphed or changed into a completely different platform than what it began as. It is sort of amazing to watch. What is troubling is that it is now owned by Google. Not that there is anything wrong as such but the reality is censorship seems to be quite arbitrary and random.

I guess the bigger problem is finding the truth between all that is uploaded.

[andrewfi]

There does seem to be a degree of inconsistency in the way that content is deprecated on social platforms. That's due to the ability of groups to campaign for content they do not like to be removed. Running in parallel to that is a relatively recent trend for those platforms to actively monitor content and remove or deprecate materials that do not align with the preferences of the management of those platforms.

This latter process is, itself, a pretty complex, multistranded affair.

All of this activity is amplified by the echo chamber effect that occurs through the 'personalisation' of what we see based upon algorithmic selection of the content in our social media feeds. It is hard for an individual to combat the effect, even if one knows what is happening. Most people don't even know that what they are seeing is designed to flatter their existing worldview rather than challenge or expand it.

[AvHdB]

While I am not sure it is a word I think the description of YouTube would be disentrop(h)y.

[Tom Cat]

4 hours before the Trump rally,  line of people waiting over 1.5 mules

[Tom Cat]

I highly recommend going to a Trump rally. After seeing how diverse and energetic his supporters are ,I'm given hope of a red November

[msmoby]

I highly recommend going to a Trump rally. After seeing how diverse and energetic his supporters are ,I'm given hope of a red November

Be sure to listen to the little voice in your head... He isn't wearing any clothes ... you'll figure it out...

[shakespear]

Trump took a hit yesterday and I hope he learned a political lesson (but I doubt it).

Sometimes optics is more important than truth. 

Chalk one up for the Democrats!

[andrewfi]

Actually, Trump played a blinder yesterday. Go read the actual text of the executive order and get back to me when you spot what has been done.