A commenter calling himself silverer explains:
I let my employees go. All nice people. I had to. Government is so oppressive, I just can’t do it anymore. All my costs of doing business constantly rises, mostly due to government mandates and regulations. Insurance is becoming a nightmare. They want to exclude everything. Every year the policy gets thicker. I have no ambition any more to grow or expand my business. I just plan now to run in neutral. If the data sucks, the gov should understand that they create the conditions that produce the lousy data.
Government causing problems? Say it isn’t so.
Commenter Wahine has this to say:
Replying to you so I can look like i’m doing something at one of those everything is fine places. My job is to process new orders and I haven’t done anything at all for a few weeks.
Proving that the economy is in excellent shape.
Comments
22 responses to “The Trouble With Business”
Something is definitely happening in our economy right now, or rather not happening. My orders for July & August were 30% of last year. That is a huge drop off, and something I’ve not seen since 9/11. I’ve investigated by contacting both suppliers and some of my best wholesale customers who confirm they are experiencing the same thing. Since my customer base is nationwide, this is not a regional downturn. I have to conclude that we are entering a recession. The stock market is confirmation also.
Used car dealers and pawn shops are going out of business. Sure sign of a booming (Obooming?) economy.
Pawn shops? That’s dire.
For the record MMM, I’m not a pawn dealer nor a used car salesman.
when taxing the rich at 90% before jfk lowered taxes on the rich are economy was much better off for the middle class. as taxes were lowered on the rich middle class slowly shrank though not so slow when bonzo got elected in 1980 and began destroying unions. rich do more evil with the more money they don’t have to pay in taxes. koch brothers very good example of this.
Frank, I wasn’t suggesting you were either. I’m pointing that when there isn’t even enough money in circulation to keep the kind of bottom feeding businesses that cater to poor people operating the economy is in serious shape.
The middle class standard of living in the 1950s was an 800 sq ft house, 1 car, black and white television, and the state of the art in medicine was the ability to perform an appendectomy without the patient dying from septicemia.
Tax revenue doubled during Reagan’s presidency. Which I’m starting to think isn’t necessarily good, from a starve the beast standpoint. Raise taxes sky high, 100% and more, so high nobody pays them.
Those eeeevil Ronnie Raygun-infested 1980s…
Over which I tripled my income, bought a new car and a house for the first time, and the music was good. Reagoon was such a disaster, the alzheimers-riddled racist, fascist old coot so senile he singlehandedly managed to blah blah blah
I can’t stand it any more.
The late, great Phil Hartman explains it:
https://screen.yahoo.com/president-reagan-mastermind-000000075.html
Another thing about those Reagan 80s:
No major wars.
Eisenhower,Nixon, Reagan
JFK, LBJ, Carter
Compare and contrast.
mountain tell that to the three hundred marines who died in lebanon.
Compare that to 50000 casualties in Vietnam.
Frank,
A 70% drop off is rather extreme.
Sending 300 assorted marines, other servicemen and French troops to Lebanon with no real mission was a useless gesture. Disarming the guards so they had no defense against suicide bombers was an asshole move. I don’t know who gave that order, but I doubt it was Reagan himself, 241 marines is way down the chain of command. Anyway, we should have bombed the place flat afterwards.
And of course, reality is a lot more complicated than zonetard’s cartoon version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombing
Cue Emily Litella Mode:
What’s all this excitement about suicide embalmers? Undertaking is a very depressing job, it’s no wonder so many kill themselves. I mean, if you had any idea what they did to dear old Uncle Fred’s body to get him ready for burial, well, it’s just awful, I just don’t know how they stand it at all.
MMM, I didn’t think you were implying anything. Just wanted to make the record clear. Like many businesses mine is also feeling the effects advancing technology. But this year over year drop is not that. I believe it’s because of less money available for the consumer and changing shopping habits. Many of my customers are in strip malls and shopping centers. Foot traffic is way down as malls are becoming ghost towns. But such a sudden and drastic drop in sales indicates recession, no doubt about it. My suppliers say they are treading water and building inventories to keep their employees busy. What happens if demand doesn’t pick up? You know the answer – lay offs, plant closings, retail bankruptcies. Recession. With the labor participation rate already down to 62%, we’re talking 1930’s depression if this keeps up.
The 1st week of Sept. ended without a single order. This is looking very bad.
MMM – Compare that to 50000 casualties in Vietnam.
It’s clear why cap zona is off-base so often on so many issues. He is, shall we say, mathematically challenged as MMM so clearly demonstrated here.
Game, set, match — MMM for the win!
sept. 11 anniversary is coming never forget bush knew! read august 2001 cia report bin ladin determined to attack in america. also see picture of congolissa rice walking by anti aircraft battery to shoot down any plane trying to crash into building she was attending meeting in milan italy shortly before 9-11, even though she said who could imagine terrorists crashing planes into buildings.
artificial stupidity. what else could it be?
Or untreated schizophrenia. Either/or.
artificial stupidity. what else could it be?
Wouldn’t that be Artificial Ztupidity?
I wonder how many lines of code it takes to run the zonebot? For a start, Eliza dates from 1966, so, as a guess, not more than a few hundred lines, given computer capabilities at the time. Eliza was quite a bit more functional than zoney.
This shouldn’t be difficult to write, it ignores all norms of punctuation, syntax and grammar, so none of that needs to be coded. It just needs to extract some key words from a post and mash in from a leftist talking point data base and regurgitate the resulting mess.