I was accused of being a crazy pessimist years ago too when I wrote about the Savannah housing market, but I called the bust pretty well — although I should have been more aggressive much sooner in my City Talk columns. But that pessimism wasn’t bias — it was just a realistic assessment based on objective data.
With numbers like these in housing, which is typically a strong driver during economic recoveries, we could see a stronger economy in 2013 than many are expecting.
We can make long-term spending part of the debate if we want, but the issue is really about paying bills that have already been incurred and meeting spending requirements that are already existing law — and wildly popular on top of that.
Key takeaways:
1. Despite various economic projections, no one can be certain what the trade impacts of the Panama Canal expansion will be.
2. The massive expenditures of tax dollars in the U.S. are happening without any clear national plan to maximize spending. States with major ports see themselves in competition with other states, not as working cooperatively for the betterment of the country.
The higher match forces local governments to be more deliberative and accountable. It enforces a basic conservative principle of local responsibility in the generally more conservative regions that rejected TSPLOST. And it continues a discounted rate in areas where citizens have shouldered higher sales tax rates.
The ongoing saga of the Georgia banking crisis continued today with indictments of seven people associated with the failed First National Bank of Savannah. From Business in Savannah’s Former Savannah bank president, six others indicted for fraud | BusinessInSavannah.com: The…
Over the long term, we’ll need to raise even more revenue and/or cut spending further, but the $1.2 trillion seems a good target for sustainability over the next decade and beyond.
That’s a lot of money, but consider the fact that the 400 wealthiest Americans have a net worth of $1.7 trillion.
Of the major expenditures in the budget, defense seems the most logical to cut. After all, in 2011, we spent more on the military than the next 13 nations combined.
The key paragraph: “The economy is expected to continue its moderate — but still subpar — pace of growth, as consumers, businesses and governments adjust to the new normal of fiscal constraint.”
As a close follower of the work of Bill McBride at Calculated Risk, I’ve been keeping up with and writing about construction employment and residential investment for many, many months.
In a perfectly logical world, public employment (i.e., government jobs) would increase on pace with population growth.
We would add more teachers, police officers, sanitation workers, health services employees and the like as the population warrants.
A few weeks ago, it was widely assumed that fears of going over the so-called “fiscal cliff” would cause employment to stagnate.
Things didn’t really work out that way. Hiring continued at a decent pace in December.
The House Republicans who were so angered by the lack of spending cuts in the deal tonight were the same ones who killed the much bigger deal that Boehner and Obama were negotiating in recent weeks. Obama’s offer that was on the table had $1.2 trillion in revenue increases and $925 billion in spending cuts over 10 years.
The big question here is with the sequester — the mandated spending cuts across the board that are expected to have a particularly harsh impact on defense spending.
