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At right: Washington Journal video of segment with WaPo economics writer Ylan Mui.
Watching Washington Journal on Friday morning, I was shocked, shocked, to hear Washington Post economics writer Ylan Mui insist that if we do not go shopping this morning, we the public will produce yet more unemployment.
For the reason that this is totally opposite of the truth, and business has just shown record profits which has not been invested into employment and expansion, I wrote in;
Dear CSpan,
Thank you for your continuing wide coverage.
Just heard Ms. Mui say; If you don’t come out and buy you might see an increase in unemployment.
So, it’s all back to consumer ‘confidence’ from the professional business reporter, which ignores that there cannot be consumption without disposable income. Making this a which is first, the chicken or the egg, and the professional chooses consumer/egg to crack open. However, for accuracy; business has prospered and should be the chance-taker, to open up the economy.
–
from Ruth
Happily, the email was read to Ms. Mui. Her response is that ‘if I understand’ the email correctly (hey, I kept it really simple) – that it says we need money in order to spend.
The ‘professional’ economist response is, really we all have money, it’s just in savings. To save the economy, we have to drag it out and spend it or we’ll make the economy tank.
Needless to say, that chicken is still trying to un-lay that egg.
Anyone surprised that the financial meltdown happened, and was a surprise to the ‘professional’ media? As Jane Hamsher found during her appearance on Washington Journal on Saturday, there are members of the public who still believe in the kind of ‘trickle down’ economics and ‘consumer confidence’ responsibility that this WaPo writer keep plugging away with.
Business is not investing, so there is not a good employment picture. Simply put so WaPo reporters can understand it, without that employment, there are not wages; without wages, there are not consumers to spend money/wages.
Ergo, economic meltdown.
81 Comments
Knowledge of basic economics obviously isn’t a job requirement to be the WAPO’s economics writer. Who could have predicted that the economics writer would have to know anything about economics?
Since editor Hiatt knows nothing about basic math or economics as evidenced from continued support for the previous administration’s version, it may well be the major requirement.
Based on OmsBudAndy’s column from yesterday basic math is not a requirement either.
Good grief. Soooooooo……people without money and jobs, are supposed to go spend money they don’t have, or they won’t have jobs? OK, I get it. Not. Just like some idiot rightwinger on Huffpost thinks that if all the lazy unemployed got jobs putting up Christmas lights for the rich instead of being lazy, they’d all have jobs, jobs, jobs. Teh Stoopid hurts.
Will not give WaPo any hits since reading Hiatt’s New Year’s thesis a few years back claiming hit numbers as a popularity index.
You have fallen across the wingnut employment plan! Take away unemployment insurance and suddenly everyone will find jobs. Fantasies are all they’ve got.
serfs must barter their corn for Prada
Which is just and fair, since we gave them all that turkee so they could afford to give us jobs…
Ruth! You did so good. I’m glad they read your e-mail. She really showed what she knows which is nothing.
Again, I will say that I am doing everything possible to not give my last few dollars to crooked politicians via big biz. We have some excellent local folks that are crafting and painting. True artists that are starving, and their work is much more valuable than plastic crap from China!
Thanks, it does seems as if she was shifted over from the Food section since economics needed a body in a chair.
Another aspect of buying local; last year we had a killer disease spread by tomatoes bought from a large chain store. Careful what you can be picking up by buying from a huge operation.
True. It seems we’ve had killer germs in almost all food products the past few years. I love the local small farmers. They actually feed their own families with what they grow and know it is good.
I meant to tell you that I recommended. This story is funny, but so good for all to see.
Appreciate the rec. I only wish more newspaper audiences were laughing instead of taking this tripe seriously.
Oh, I still visit their web site – if only to know what the conventional wisdom will be amongst the Villagers.
Congratulations Ruth, you’ve discovered a new black hole. Reason and truth have no hope of escaping the event horizon of something that dense.
I prefer to think of it as another proof that, at WaPo, reason and truth are safely out of reach.
BTW, I liked your letter. Sorry to see it fall into the WaPo zone.
Oh don’t give us that lame “we don’t have any money” excuse. We know you have it in savings! /s
Interesting “tell” on her part. Who is it that really does have any savings? Businesses have been hoarding money loaned to them to stimulate hiring. Oh well.
All the people she knows have lots of money in savings and in stocks and bonds, therefore everyone else does too, including the people who are unemployed and off the rolls.
Flunked economics and doesn’t know what’s going on outside her own enclave.
“there cannot be consumption without disposable income”
There is that tiny little flaw in Ms. Mui’s plan, isn’t there?
dosido: “Businesses have been hoarding money”
Yep. With luck that’ll change once they’re finally told what the new taxes and regulations will be, whenever the hell that happens.
Wall, meet head. Head, this is wall. Bump, bump, bump. Stuff like this makes me absolutely crazy. I have a part-time job (all I can get) and am getting ready to file for Social Security early so I can make ends meet and I’m causing the economy to tank because I won’t spend money I don’t have? And if I did spend the money, then a few months from now I would be called irresponsible because I took on debt I couldn’t afford. My dwindling savings are not going to be tapped for “consumer consumption”.
They’re trying to draw blood from stones. Won’t work.
The best way out of this mess is to a) raise taxes on the wealthy to take that pile of money away from them and b) then spend that on useful public stuff we need anyway. Won’t happen, but it still needs saying.
stewartm
No no no, as my conservative friends tell me the unemployed are unemployed because they’re lazy and don’t want to work. According to them they’re lots of scut jobs that these lay abouts could do but refuse to. The fact that it’s been widely reported that for every job out here that comes available they’re 5 candidates doesn’t manage to ring a bell with these people. Why? because like on so many other topics Reich wing ideology trumps the facts, reason , science and just plain common sense.
From the book salon at the FDL front page;
Matt Taibbi November 27th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
127
In response to Ruth Calvo @ 119 (hide text)
me; The industry leaders seem to think that if they wait long enough, there will be enough consumer confidence building up to start back into the same groove, without ever valuing their toxic holdings down – so all the loss will be that of consumers. Had a WaPo economics writer declaring on Washington Journal that consumers have the money to Go Shopping, it’s all just in savings right now, and we’re holding up the business world from returning to full employment. Honestly, it seems they have their own bubble world and are not, not, not going to see through the soap film
MT:
Ruth –
Exactly right. They hope this all blows over and that the underlying toxic assets somehow recover before the pyramid collapses and they are all exposed.
and
Matt Taibbi November 27th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
142
In response to Ruth Calvo @ 131 (show text)
Fred Hiatt was the Moscow bureau chief when I was there in the nineties. He would have made an excellent Soviet reporter, let me put it that way.
The repeated use of the phrases like “Ummm… ummm..” tells me she’s an idiot.
daKine, my first glance at your reply saw “the Viagra set” instead of “the Villagers.”
Your typo or my mistake?
Well, there probably isn’t much difference between the two groups as far as that goes.
And of course they won’t get organized and violent at the true enemy. They will take it out on the scapegoat of the week.
The plutocrats and their flunkies in the corporate media are idiots. Perhaps if a guillotine were to be erected at the Washington Monument they just might have a “road to Damascus” conversion. Until such time that they are held accountable they will continue to scam the U.S. and the world public.
Spend, you broke mother fuckers, or we’ll lay off more of you!
And save more cause SS won’t be there!
I watched that segment and was disgusted by the WP reporter. She seemed to find the entire situation pretty amusing and it was perfectly apparent that it wasn’t real people with real lives, who once had real dreams, who were the beneficiaries of her pals criminality on the receiving end of this economic disaster.
No preview, no edit to fix abortive attempt at html, either…
We buy what we do not make in the US so the jobs on offer are service jobs – distribution/wholesale/retail – which is us paying each other to handle foreign made product that we bought with loans because we earned little selling our stuff made in the US or grown here abroad.
And the WaPo thinks this can continue? – Or that this situation is made better with full employment to follow by our borrowing individually money to increase our buying on Black Friday. Well we may indeed increase the population of retail clerks – about 10% of the Xmas temps will be kept on. But the economic knowledge shown by WaPo is less than that of a 6th grader in a good school. We need gov borrowing for a stimulus program that gets US manufacturing and construction going again, and that focus requires trade policy changes, and the GOP will not allow either to happen.
Has Michelle Malkin been cloned?
Maybe Ylan Mui will float me a loan for a few thousand bucks so I can do my part to
help the struggling economylet the corporations and banksters keep their loot. That is the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long time and we all know what kind of statement that makes.Who ordered the side of maggots?
That opinion tells me she’s an idiot.
Who is consuming WaPo these days? Haven’t they lost a lot of business?
They’re idiots. They want the conservative crowd but the problem is that a day doesn’t go by that Rush doesn’t call them “liberal” or “socialist”.
Morons. All they accomplish is flushing their credibility along with their readership.
Perhaps we should all write her and ask. ;-)
Gah – a person could get whiplash from the disparate messaging from the Village:
“SPEND! AUSTERITY! SPEND! AUSTERITY!”
It’ up to the private sector to spend. It’s bad when the government spends money, or anything else, apparently.
There’s a plan. I guess I’ll have to go to WaPo for her email address?
Reporters like this 15 year old can’t inspire many new subscriptions.
Anyway, Ruth, to me the problem is that the press almost universally knows nothing about economics. They think they do, because they can recite the trickle down litanies. The problem is, though, that most never went beyond that. I wonder how Ylan Mui would do on one of those economics tests merlin1963 mentioned yesterday.
Mr. Mackey: “You shouldn’t spend money….’cause spending’s bad….m-kay? We need to cut the deficit ’cause deficits are bad…m-kay?”
Mr. Garrison: “Okay boys and girls, I want you all to go out and spend your money on toys this Christmas because Mr. Hat and I invested all of our retirement in Toy’s R Us. If we get a good return maybe I can finally get some poontang… (that’s right Mr. Garrison)”.
They offer this page as a way of communicating.
Ruth, it just sounds so logical and sensible when you connect the economic dots that way.
I can’t help feeling that we’re on the verge of another Great Depression, but this time around there won’t be an FDR-led federal government trying everything possible to pull our nation’s economic butt out of a conservative-ignited greed-driven fire. Insane Republican obstructionism. Insane Republican policies. It’s like the Hoover years all over again. Help the wealthy (no matter what the cost to our country), screw the middle-class and poor (no matter what the cost to them and their families), leaving our nation in economic ruins. History repeating itself…again. And with all the “hair on fire” warning signs (like before the 9/11 attacks) being ignored by almost everyone up in Washington D.C., but especially the corporate-owned anti-labor anti-working class Republicans and their right-wing media talking heads. Definitely a recipe for another Republican-caused conservative-fueled disaster.
Supply side economics has worked the past 30 years plus and so fat. The creative entrepreneurs have produced and imported garbage attractive enough to entice the people to go in debt up to their ears. Now they have or are cashing in the 401ks The boobs on the supply side haven’t figured out the people are running out of money. Look at the crowds at the malls, I wonder if the boobs on the consumer side have figured that out either.
so fat so good, i’m ready to pull the rip cord, if need be.
Paraphrasing something I saw recently. Sorry I have forgotten where.
We have an FDR moment and have gotten Hoover.
The media only knows it is assigned the task of promoting the corporate agenda. CNN is shameless in this.
Thank you. :)
Mod where is the numbers and edit now?
So fat so good.
Is that a great typo, or are you just fat out?
And everything else?
Krugman said that.
am loopy and easily amused, so to speak…
Shadow Stats has the real unemployment rate at a point near 24%:
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
Since unemployed people tend to be thrifty (since they lack money and can expect to lack money in the near-future) and since some employed individuals are also poor and lack disposable income (by definition, given a poverty threshold of $11,161 for a single individual under the age of 65), neither the unemployed nor the working poor can be expected to contribute in much to the season’s consumer demand. They simply lack the money to spend and can confidently predict that they will not have money to spend on luxury items in the near-future. Thus blaming this composite group in any way for a demand constrained recession is just vile.
I find it hard to determine whether individuals like Ms. Mui are just dumb, shamelessly corrupt or rendered incorrigible by an ideology.
TBogg is upstairs!
Me And Colby And God Are Watching Sarah Grow
Austerity doesn’t work. Just like square wheels or jello pavers, it’s worse than futile. It’s hard for people to spend money they don’t have though and just because Mui has a rainy day savings account that she’d really rather not touch if she can avoid it, (“but what they hey, I’ll do my part”), doesn’t mean most of the rest of us do. I have about 2,000 dollars in checking and 7,000 in savings and with zero income, that’s all that’s between me and homelessness. Yeah, I’ll go out and spend that to “revive the economy”. Just hold your breath and wait for me to do it. Clueless bitch.
WTF? First, analysts are already predicting that this will be the best year for consumer spending in three years. Ylan Mui might want to look into it. Second, layoffs over the last twenty years – cutting people to increase quarterly profits and executive compensation – significantly contributed to the creation of this problem, and the assholes who created it aren’t going to hire again for many years and probably not ever enough to help change the situation. The only way to change the situation is to impose limits of executive compensation. In other words, we need a new contract that accounts for new realities in the 21st century. Abolish corporate personhood, too.
Stupid corporatist yuppie fascist. Of course, we shouldn’t spend. The capitalist elite is busy impoverishing us all. Screw that. Everyone should save.
Honestly, it seems to me that she is confusing the lower/middle class with the upper ranks of wealth.
Isn’t it the upper class that keeps the majority of their wealth in savings, while the lower classes tend to spend most of their money immediately in order to afford bills and necessities – with money only going into savings if enough is left over or if they are looking to pay for something specific?
Or she’s just ignorant enough to think that “everybody” “everywhere” has enough money saved up that they could spend it on impulse buys…which raises the question of if she thinks the recession is even real at all.
WaPo has trained her to be politically correct.
“The two pillars of political correctness are:
a) willful ignorance
b) a steadfast refusal to face the truth”
- George MacDonald
I’d blame WaPo and Washington Journal…. they should know better than to have someone unqualified working the econ beat. Ms. Mui would probably provide solid advice within her area of expertice. She probably has wonderful tips on where to shop for a new pair of jeans.
If I started a great full time, permanent job tomorrow, I’d still be reluctant to spend.
Hey this stupid woman is young and employed by the reich wing media. She has nothing to worry about it. When you are old (ie over 40 like me) you have to hold to everything you have.
This woman makes me puke blood.
Me either! I’m so damned mad that I don’t want my money to go to big corps or overseas!
I’m late to this party but I want to wish all of those still working a job thru the December layoff season. Actually, I hope you retain your job for years to come. I’m just thinking of those that will soon get the ax as many of us did two years ago.
I wonder if they’ll be starting a CAT FOOD Section at the Post? Would fit right in with the “Business” and “Food” sections.
As Jane Hamsher found during her appearance on Washington Journal on Saturday, there are members of the public who still believe in the kind of ‘trickle down’ economics and ‘consumer confidence’ responsibility that this WaPo writer keep plugging away with.
So, apparently, does a VP at my job. He mentioned “consumer confidence” and the recovery.
I thought “clueless, just clueless”. We’ll still be lucky if 2009-2010 doesn’t turn out to be the false recovery of 1930, when the stock market rebounded, only to tumble again in vengeance (because the Hoover administration, like Obama, had not really addressed the economy’s true needs).
stewartm
These stupid comments from this moron raise an important point: rather than workers’ strikes, it’s time for Americans to organize consumers’ strikes.
Well technically she is correct if you consider that for quite some time our economy has been held aloft by people buying shit they don’t need with money they don’t really have. When consumers stop consuming so much, then yeah, what else is there to pick up the slack. Too bad she couldn’t have talked about the big picture: how we have been living in an unsustainable consumer economy.
This idea, organizing consumers strikes, has a lot of merit. Americans are really good at doing nothing. I mean, we just stay home. How hard is that?
Here’s another REAL SIMPLE message to Ms. Mui: “YOU”RE STUPID – LEAVE”.
They are now a private education company with an unprofitable advertising arm in the Village, I hear. WaPo Corp owns Kaplan (test prep, for-profit university), and supposedly that’s where most of the black ink comes from.
Of course, this has NOTHING to do with the anti-public school, anti-professional-teacher, anti-teachers’-union “Waiting for Superman” hype prevalent in the media of late.
Looks like NAFTA is public Fault according to WaPo editor.
Looks like Tax Benefits to invest in totalitarian regimes from Securities Modernization Act which also BTW repealed that pesky Glass Steagall Act is public Fault according to WaPo editor.
Looks like ever increasing regressive taxation is Public Fault according to WaPo editor.
Looks like tax giveaways to top 1% in Tax Haven countries is Public Fault according to WaPo editor.
Looks like corporations hoarding money is Public Fault according to WaPo editor.
Looks like disposable income drained by 20% fines, interests, penalties by banks is Public Fault according to WaPo editor.
Now that old fashioned Social Security saved the day by keeping economy collapsing with a domino effect and something has to be done about so that whole country sings to the tune of wall street and opens bailout bags on the spot when requested by Wall street.
Looks like once Social Security is tweaked then everything will be alright according to WaPo editor if given a chance to impart more wisdom to us all.
Consumer strikes? Unfortunately, that’s been what’s de facto going on, as people’s real wages declined.
Of course, the-powers-that-be don’t realize that the truth, as (in a debate here on FDL yesterday) they have started to believe their own propaganda on how good we peons have it. But it’s the cold hard truth.
stewartm
The history of labor as told in a Jewish joke:
In the 50’s parents would brag about their sons or daughters being engineers, lawyers
In the 60’s parents would brag about their sons or daughters having a full-time job with benefits (union job)
In the 70’s parents would brag about their sons or daughters and their spouses having full-time jobs no benefits
In the 80’s parents would brag about their sons or daughters and their spouses having two part-time jobs
In the 90’s parents would brag about their sons or daughters and their spouses having a part-time job
In the 2000 parents would brag about their sons or daughters and their spouse collecting unemployment and delivering pizzas on the side
Today they brag about how handy they are around the house and how they keep the basement clean where they live with their kids.
Wages have become stagnant since the 60’s. Gasoline cost .31 cents a gallon, minimum wage $1.25 1966. Today gas $2.90 minimum wage $7.25
A gallon of (leaded) gas in the United States in 1960 cost only 31 cents! That sounds like an incredible bargain until you factor in inflation.
31 cents in 1960 is equivalent to $2.07 in the year 2007. The national average cost of a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline in 2007 was $2.78, or about a 34% increase over the average price in 1960.
The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline on April 28, 2008 was $3.60. This means that gas prices have increased 82 cents/gallon in the past year alone. This is a 30% real price increase in a single year.
Or looking at it another way, the real increase in gas prices in a single year (from 2007 to 2008) is approximately the same percentage increase as the total increase for the preceding 47 years (1960 to 2007). http://historical.whatitcosts.com/facts-gas.htm
So Americans have less disposable income to spend and it is getting worse every year.
Capitalism is nearly dead and people are failing to realize this. Capitalism relies on the infinite supply of two things. First an infinite supply of natural resources and second, an infinite supply of consumers to buy the products. Both are in short supply now as natural resources are getting harder and harder to find, and consumers with money are getting harder to find as well.
What does this mean? It means that you are going to have a planned economy in the future. What else will happen? Protectionism is on the horizon.
Wrote and told her she was outrageously clueless. I’m sure she’s flushing all her email, but made me feel a little better.