Recent Comments

1. about 4 hours ago on Luann

   Yes, Life, the Universe and Everything. That would include all the questions in the strip.

2. about 4 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

   “Obama job creation in eight years = 6,074,000 or 759,250 a year. Trump job creation in three years = 6,989,000 or 2,313,000 a year”

   You’re comparing apples and oranges. Both Obama and Trump had to deal with a crisis which they could not control, which affected the employment rate. The financial crisis hit at the end of W’s term, and unemployment was already going up when Obama took over. Judging by the numbers in that chart, it wasn’t until two years later that you were starting to recover from that crisis. You don’t take that into consideration, and include the high unemployment numbers created by something that happened before Obama took office. Trump also faced a crises that he couldn’t stop (although I think he could have handled it better) – that caused an increase in unemployment, but you stop just before that happened. Either leave off the first two years of Obama’s term, or include the last year of Trumps term. Otherwise you’re not being fair. Also, it looks to me like your numbers don’t quite add up based on the chart you linked to.

   You can find the number of employed people by subtracting the number of unemployed people from the entire work force. Using those numbers, we can see that from 2008 – 2016 (Obama’s full term), the increase in the number of jobs was (in thousands) 6,073, while the increase from 2010-2016 (without the financial crisis as the controlling factor) was 12,362. Corresponding numbers for Trump are 6,102 if you leave off the last year, but a loss of 3,641 if you take his full term. Whichever you choose, 12,362 vs. 6,102 or 6,073 vs. -3641, Obama comes out ahed. So, take your pick, but be fair.

3. about 9 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

   “Decreasing unemployment means one of two things; people are getting jobs or people are leaving the labor force because they think there are no jobs.”

   Your logic doesn’t work for two reasons. First, people can leave the work force for a number of reasons other than that they are giving up, and the number of people not in the work force also includes the people who are added to the population, but are not joining the work force, e.g. because more people are staying in school longer. Secondly, as I pointed out before, the unemployment rate dropped by 4.7 percentage points during the last six years of Obama’s term, but the number of people not in the work force increased over the same time by only 1.9 percentage points (35.3% to 37.2%, measured as a percentage of the “Civilian noninstitutional population”), and that’s not enough to explain the drop in unemployment during that time.

   I have to go somewhere now, but I’ll reply to the rest of your post later.

4. about 10 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

   “Since 45% of the population does not pay any income tax, it stands to reason that most lower middle class and poor do not pay any income tax or at best only a small amount, so a tax cut for them would be meaningless.”

   Maybe “tax break” was a poorly chosen term, but whatever method is used and whatever it is called, it’s the lower middle class and the poor who need more money, not billionaires.

5. about 13 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

   “I take my numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics table A-1:”

   Look at the next-to-last column, and you’ll see it shows exactly what I said. The unemployment rate went up during the financial crisis and continued going up for a couple of years after Obama took office, then it started going down, and during the rest of his term the unemployment rate went down from 9.6% in 2010 to 4.9% in 2016 (4.7 percentage points in 6 years, which come out to about 0.8 points per year). It kept going down through most of Trumps term, from 4.9 in 2016 to 3.7 in 2019 (1.2 percentage points in 3 years, or 0.4 points per year – half of what Obama accomplished). The unemployment rate then went up to 8.1% as a result of the pandemic, which no president could have prevented.

6. about 13 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

   “When corporations get a their taxes raised they raise prices.”

   But when they raise their prices, they make more profit, and when they make more profit, they have to pay more taxes.

7. about 13 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

   “Employment… bogged down during Obama’s dirigisme, then soared again under Trump.”

   This is getting tiring. Trump’s followers have been making that claim practically from the day he took office. Check out this chart:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Employment_Statistics.svg

   Unemployment went up during W’s term because of the financial crisis. It started going down shortly after Obama took office, and kept going down as a result of policies Obama had put in place. Then, almost as soon as he took office, Trump took the credit for what Obama had done.

8. about 17 hours ago on Cathy Classics

   There’s even an app for finding and downloading apps.

9. about 17 hours ago on Lola

   Everything is “gluten-free” these days, even things that never contained gluten in the first place. I went to the store yesterday, and I noticed that they had gluten-free chocolate.

10. about 17 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

    “…but there’s no way in HELL (which his where they work, in my opinion) would a politician vote for it.”

    Not entirely true. Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented pretty much what Rat is suggesting. He used the tax and health care systems to give more money to those with lower income. Things were going pretty well until Ronald Reagan turned things around with “Reaganomics” (aka "supply side economics), and things have been going downhill since.