GDP figures out this morning were stronger than expected. The Australian economy grew by 1.2% in the June quarter, real gross domestic income grew 6.5% in the 2010-11 financial year — the largest growth since 1987-88.
Nice maths for Treasurer Wayne Swan. If only President Obama could boast a better set of figures. Obama will take the nation through the numbers of his jobs package plan Thursday night (US time) in his address to Congress.
In the meantime, the numbers are in on his latest approval rating, and it’s the worst of his presidency.
A new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that 53% of Americans now disapprove of the job Barack Obama is doing.
Six in 10 people think he’s doing a bad job on the economy.
And 78% of political independents think the country is on the wrong track.
Maybe they caught sight of these gobsmacking numbers from The New York Times published earlier in the week:
Click on image for the full rundown c/o The New York Times
This is going to have to be some package, not to lift the President’s numbers, but to lift an ever-growing proportion of Americans from the brink of poverty.
Is this the result of “Reaganomics”?
Jimmy – yep! Smash unions and in the short term profits soar. Problem comes down the line when your customers no longer earn enough to buy your goods, and cannot go further into debt. Cue Karl Marx and a crisis of overproduction…
There was something trickling down, allright.
Maybe Obama can take a cue from the Rudd-ledand Treasury-advised ALP and “go hard, go households”, instead of more bailouts for Wall St.
As the foreman said to the labourer, “that there steam shovel will do the work of a hundred of you blokes”. Said the soon to be unemployed shovel wielder, “and how many lattes will it buy?”
If the current gov. had a fraction of the brainpower of a beansprout, they would have pointed (out at the start of the GFC or yesterday) that SerfChoices, gleefully proclaimed by the Rodent hisself as intended to bring us into line (sic! or ‘to heel’) with amerikan work practices, would have cut another 5% of the available workforce off at the knees, or ankles given Li’l Johnny’s reach.
Soon or later, workforces have to be employed or they turn violent – the veneer of civilisation is only three missed meals thick.
It is also instructive to observe that the compensation/wage curves are relentlessly downwards thru the entire Reagan and Bush I era, to turn upward in the Clinton period (the most prosperous period of the past 35 years, finishing with balanced budgets). Then abruptly flatlining for the whole Bush II period–during which productivity increases slow down. And lo, wages are already trending upwards in the Obama period. Productivity is climbing steeply but of course this should not be equated with “prosperous” times or be thought of as beneficial since it merely reflects that industry has laid off tens of millions of workers, and as AR (8:01 am) commented can only lead to insurrection, even if the dumbed down American public fail to understand why.