[Iran Press TV Latest] Forecasters have portrayed a grim outlook for California's economy, saying that the golden state is going to remain stagnant for the next two years.
The new study comes on the heels of a forecast indicating a budget deficit of 21 billion dollars which is going to be the highest among all other US states.
Senior economist, Jerry Nickelsburg, who is with the Anderson Forecast from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), blames the state's economic downturn on America's lack of spending.
"California sits on the Pacific Rim and we're the locust of imports and manufactured consumer goods from Asia...the US consumer is not buying so that industry is not really growing," Nickelsburg told Press TV's Ross Frasier.
The Forecast director Ed Leamer thinks differently holding the state's government mainly responsible for crippling the economy. Leamer maintains the best way to revive California is to replace the system running it.
"We have term limits, we have two-thirds majority, we have total disarray in Sacramento...and this problem with the budget deficit seems pretty familiar because we were here just a few years ago and we're going to be here again unless we change the way the state is governed," he says.
Leamer believes California needs to handle it's economic troubles without aid from the federal government. He says bailout money would only make the problem worse.
"My own personal opinion is now is the time to let the private sector do the natural thing it does to help heal the economy, help economic growth occur, and help create jobs for Americans," he says.
US President Barack Obama's Administration has proposed a hefty 787 billion dollar stimulus plan to revive the ailing US economy and create jobs for Americans.
The UCLA Anderson Forecast predicts double digit unemployment for California until 2012 as it argues the state is not creating enough jobs.
"The stalled California economy is simply not producing the jobs required for the new entrants to the labor force over the next couple of years to prevent these elevated levels of unemployment to persist once the job lay-offs cease," UCLA says.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/11/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
California sits on the Pacific Rim and we're the locust of imports and manufactured consumer goods from Asia...
#3
I'd have thought that "stagnant for the next two years" was a fairly rosy forecast under the circumstances.
"Locust" is certainly an evocative description of California.
Posted by: James ||
12/11/2009 2:25 Comments ||
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#4
Locust, a malapropism, heh.
She said, "I love you," with a voice full of emulsion.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
12/11/2009 7:37 Comments ||
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#5
Perhaps Mr. Nickelsburg was referring to the CA government and the legions of freeloaders it supports.
Posted by: ed ||
12/11/2009 8:04 Comments ||
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#6
Dont you wish you lived in California>
Somewhere between Brawley and El Centro with a good view of the Mohave. And an old car in the yard and a clothes line out back. My childhood memories.
My mother let me play in the Irrigation canals in my underwear. And the friendly big birds used to land and look at me. Big birds.
#7
I used to live in a distant dirt-road suburb, back up against the Angeles National Forest, with a view of mountains, and a horse in our backyard. We used to hike through the chaparral and listen to coyotes howling way down in the canyon.
Used to be a nice place, California. Pity.
#9
Liberals took over there years ago when it was the Golden State. They assaulted private enterprise and heavy business regulation. IF they are ever put out of business when California is looking like a third world cesspool, they will still go out kicking and screaming because they will be too stupid to know what they did. That is how dumb and deranged liberals are.
#11
I've been known to splash around in the Pacific Ocean in my undies. But my mom didn't know about it.
Well, we've been overwhelmed by illegal immigration, raped by developers and mismanaged by the worst frickin' bunch of crooked politicians you could ever imagine. Our schools are a joke and our hospital ERs look like the Third World. I've been telling Mrs. Uluque for several years now that we need to get the hell outta here but it's hard for her to let go.
Then you get morons like this guy Nickelsbug who laments the fact that Americans aren't buying enough plastic crap from China anymore. Excuse me but I see that as a good thing. Maybe if we get desperate enough we'll learn how to make things here again.
#12
Well, I haven likened Californians to locusts - they move into a state in large numbers and bring their destructive politics with them, eventually stripping the land and destroying it.
That's the question posed by Jennifer Duffy, senior editor at the influential Cook Political Report (via Politico).
"[I]t is increasingly clear to both independent analysts and Democratic leaders that Dodd is just too badly damaged to have a decent shot at getting re-elected, almost regardless of who wins the Republican nomination. Democrats have given Dodd time to attempt to repair his problems, but nothing appears to have helped enough to salvage his position,'' Duffy writes. The publication has moved the Connecticut Senate race from "toss up" to "leans Republican.''
Colleen Flanagan, spokeswoman for state Democrats, dismissed the Cook Report ratings change as inside-the-beltway political handicapping.
"It's no secret what the Washington smart guys think about this race,'' she said in an email after the [Hartford] Courant asked for a comment. "But it just doesn't matter what they think. They don't vote in Connecticut and they don't really understand Chris Dodd's decades of service and the relationship he's built with folks here by delivering for them time and again."
Yet, the depth of Dodd' troubles are clear to many in Connecticut, where once heretical whispers that the state's senior senator step aside in favor of the immense popular Attorney General Richard Blumenthal or perhaps U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, have grown louder.
Following Dodd's lousy showing in a Quinnipiac University poll last month, the Courant spoke with more than a dozen Democratic party activists and left-leaning bloggers. While few were willing go on the record, they all spoke of their fears that Dodd wouldn't be able turn things around by election day, 2010 and many privately expressed their hopes that he would step aside for the overall benefit of the party.
#4
I dunno. It's amazing to me that guys like that ever get elected in the first place. Dodd, Teddy, Bawney Fwank, Byrd...Pelosi and Boxer. It doesn't say a lot for the people casting the ballots.
In 1998, when the Clinton White House found itself in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal, one of its key defense strategies was to attack the conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife as the dark power behind the allegations against the president. The Clinton camp believed Scaife to be "the Goldfinger of the right-wing conspiracy," as Newsweek put it in a February 1998 report.
Now it's the Obama White House that is in trouble. The president isn't engulfed in scandal, but his political fortunes are waning, with historically low job approval ratings for this point in his term and an administration struggling to pass its initiatives, even with big Democratic majorities in Congress. And now, as in the Clinton years, White House surrogates are looking for a billionaire to blame. This time, they've found two.
"The Billionaires Behind the Hate" is the title of a new report published by the Center for American Progress, which is the liberal think tank run by John Podesta, the former Clinton chief of staff who also ran the Obama transition and serves as an outside adviser to the Obama White House. The supposedly hateful billionaires in the article's title are brothers Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, one of the nation's largest conglomerates.
And what do they hate? The "progressive agenda." The Kochs, according to Podesta's group, are "responsible for a vicious attack campaign aimed directly at obstructing and killing progressive reform." First, they opposed the stimulus, financing "television and radio ads deriding the recovery package as simply 'pork' spending." Imagine that! Then, through the group Americans for Prosperity, they helped organize some of the first "Tea Party" protests.
From there, it was on to stopping environmental cap-and-trade legislation. According to the Center, the Kochs have helped fund "an underhanded campaign to falsely charge that a set of hacked e-mails somehow unravels the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring." In addition, Americans for Prosperity has run ads "mocking environmentalists as spoiled brats concerned about their 'three homes and five cars' than about economic conditions."
As if all that weren't bad enough, the Kochs also oppose the Democratic party's national health care plan. The brothers stirred "fierce opposition" to national health care and have "fostered extremism" by "hijack[ing] the health reform debate" at town halls across the country last August. The result of those town halls was that the White House learned for the first time that many Americans do not favor an across-the-board remaking of the health care system. The hate, apparently, never stops.
By the way, the Center concedes that the Kochs are "best known for their wealth, as well as for their generous contributions to the arts, cancer research, and the Smithsonian Institute." But Podesta's group argues the Kochs oppose the progressive agenda because their businesses are big polluters and also because they have "a long family tradition of funding conservative movements to shift the country to the far right." Put it all together, and you have "a long history of stopping progress."
Aside from its remarkable language -- is it "hate" to believe the stimulus, cap-and-trade and the current health care proposals are bad policy? -- the Podesta group's attack on the Kochs is striking because the Center for American Progress is itself the product of politically-active billionaires. It would never have come into existence without the backing of California-based Herbert and Marion Sandler, who founded Golden West Financial Corporation and made billions engaging in some of the most irresponsible subprime lending of the first years of this decade. (After the financial collapse, their reputation sank so low that they were brutally parodied in a "Saturday Night Live" sketch last year.)
In 2003, Herbert Sandler approached Podesta, then a law professor at Georgetown, with a proposal to found what would become the new think tank. It turned out Podesta had already been thinking about a similar idea, and the two men talked at length, and talked further when Podesta flew to San Francisco for more detailed discussions. The Sandlers, who are also close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ended up talking Podesta into taking the job.
There is another billionaire, George Soros, who is also close to the Center. In 2003, in the middle of spending nearly $30 million of his own money in a quest to unseat President George W. Bush, Soros pledged to give the Center $1 million a year for three years. It was less than the Sandlers gave, but it was key support for an institution then getting off the ground. (I wrote about the founding of the Center, and how Podesta created an institution that combined the functions of think tank and political war room, in my book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.)
You might say that all that money from the Sandlers, Soros and others has gone toward opposing -- hating? -- the conservative agenda. But it is Charles and David Koch who are "The Billionaires Behind the Hate." If you are looking for a sign that the White House, having gone through Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Glenn Beck, and others, is flailing around in the search for new enemies to blame for its troubles, you can't do better than the new Center for American Progress report.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/11/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
Better find one quick...
PAKISTAN TRIBUNE > GATES SAYS US MAY HAVE TO BANKROLL AFGHANISTAN FOR 20 YEARS [see also KARZAI].
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
