We must renegotiate world treaties like NAFTA and GATT, every blasted last global treaty, that puts profit over human living and most pertinent, working conditions. The very iPod I now write on, has a powerful statistical possibility, that a Chinese worker killed herself. We must increase global awareness of the literal slave factories out there! It's despicable: We rush to buy products, yet never consider the brutal working conditions. And in America too: Ever see "Undercover Boss"? They gloss over the also horrible and slavish working conditions like this past Sunday night. Ever see The " I Love Lucy" episode whe Lucy and Ethel had to eat gobs of chocolates because the bosses want "Peak Production Quotas," another freaking euphemism for slavery! Or what about workers who must stand for 8 hours without a chair. Every worker I speak says it's fine, but there eyes tell it tall: Silent and desperate fear of their bosses. Maybe this recession is nothing but a cover-up to shut up workers, so human slavery can live long and prosper, Gov. Romney.  View

I think it's a multitude of factors.. high ticket prices, recession causing people to focus on gifts/essentials, alternatives redbox and netflix cutting into profits..maybe ppl are simply over sequels ;-)  View

They didn't succeed in banning light bulbs (yet), but they did succeed in driving all the bulb manufactures out of the US -- during a recession. Go Congress!  View

That's a bunch of crap, kwd. How is Obama going after "job creators?" And what thought process allows people to believe that small businesses aren't hiring much because of some nebulous "uncertainty" other than as related to customer demand? The same reason they laid people off in the beginning of the recession is the same guiding force of whether they are hiring or not, and that force is customer demand.  View

Holy spin, Fox News. What an absolute load of crap. Apparently they didn't read the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's report that said the CRA had no connection to the financial crisis. Apparently they have no idea of the sources of our deficit, nor the difference between running deficits during a recession versus running deficits any old time like when the economy is stable. And they even throw in the simplistic "Internet boom" blanket dismissal of the Clinton policies. My God... And commenters here complain of bias when this "fair and balanced" source isn't included in every story? What, does reality need to be balanced by fantasy storytelling?  View

Thank you, voice4truth, for using your psychic powers to tell me all the things I believe that even I wasn't aware I believed. All this time I thought I was basing my stances on an understanding of economic realities, and here it turns out I was actually just a socialist trying to take other people's money and trying to not work or whatever. Man, people must refer to you as "genius" all the time. /sarcasm The major driver of outsourcing is labor costs (wages), not corporate tax rates (which btw the US already has one of the lower effective corp tax rates already). You can put corporate tax rates to zero and you still won't see manufacturing jobs come back from the developing world, for example. 2nd of all, outsourcing isn't even the problem. This is a recession, and a global one at that. The cause of it is low consumer demand. Workers can't afford to buy the goods and services they produce. If you create demand, you'll have business popping up to meet that demand. You create this demand by helping average people. High employment leads to higher average incomes and more people paying income tax. Cain's plan is the opposite. It demands more taxes of people who have the least money, people who already pay the largest share of their income to payroll tax, sales tax, and fees than any other group. This leads to less demand, which leads to less business profits, less money for the wealthy, less jobs, and fewer people earning enough to qualify for any income tax. Great idea, right?  View

I do have to disagree with one point that Tim made. Outsourcing of jobs Is a major problem. Jobs aren't outsourced just because of wage differences they are also outsourced to avoid governmental regulations. Our economic policies are not ideal for competition in a globalized environment. Many of our extant policies are double edged swords, giving a useful benefit on one hand but decreasing a companies profits on the other. The EPA makes for a cleaner environment but costs a business more to comply with it. OSHA makes a safer work environment but costs more money for a company to comply with it. Unions win better wages and benefits for there members but they really eat up a companies profitability. All of this was fine when we were only dealing with our own economy, but when we entered upon globalization we hit a snag. Now, big businesses ship our jobs overseas were they don't have an EPA or OSHA or Unions or medical insurance costs... You are right, consumer demand is down. But one of the things that led us out of the Great Depression was our production of valuable goods and services. You notice that financial news sources stated that we came out of the recession a couple of years ago, but it doesnt feel like it. Thats because our big businesses recovered but they aren't as connected to the American people as they once were. This is one of the reasons why "trickle down economics" is no longer is a valid concept. It just makes the rich richer at the expense of the rest of us.  View

40th is a racist big time. He's racist against ne body that's not black and I bet if a white dying of thirst and he had water, he wouldn't give it too the white. The funny thing is he thinks bcuz he's black he's screwed. The guy helped me get a job was black and be gets paid oh 400,000 a year. 40th will U jus shut up ur a racist piece of crap and ppl like u make the world worse, actually contribute too the world and stop whining. Oh and no we def should not support illegal aliens and those that say we should obviously don't realize that were in a recession or don't kno anything bout economics bcuz this is jus gonna make it worse.  View

The consumer savings rate usually goes up in a recession, meaning people save more and pay off debt, compared to pre-recession when they borrow readily because they expect they'll easily keep earning more money to pay it off later. Seeing the savings rate increase is a good sign for helping us to get out of the recession sometime in the future, even if it hurts now. I think it's a bad sign if savings were to decrease but still not be enough to pull us out and then be followed by a second recession. That would mean we'd be in an even bigger hole.  View

Back in 2005, Germany had unemployment rate of 11%. Did they suddenly become well educated to drop it down to 6% in a few years? No, of course not. The unemployment rate isn't based on education levels or skills. Education and skills will tend to affect average wages due to the type of businesses that are drawn to that labor force, sure. But the level of unemployment for a particular area in a global recession is going to depend mostly on how susceptible the main industries of the area are to a downturn. For example, people won't stop eating staple foods, so wheat farmers aren't affect, but people do cut back on leisure travel, so luxury tourism is heavily affected. Anyway, if you think education (or "work harder") is the solution to unemployment in this recession, you're missing the point. This is an economic imbalance where the people who would want goods and services don't have the money to demand them, so aggreggate demand isn't enough to sustain full employment. The root cause has to do with the growth of economic inequality from the natural forces of globalization and races to the bottom.  View