perfidy

However, this recovery is very lumpy. For example, my state, Massachusetts, is still shedding jobs at quite a clip. The most recent analyses suggest that Massachusetts tends to benefit greatly from extended booms, and suffer more than the rest of the country during even mild recession. Economically, Massachusetts is starting to resemble... Europe. Slow-growing, prone to stumbles.

Just one more thing for the rest of the country to hate us for.

Bill Hobbs is full of crap. The primary use of LLC registrations is tax avoidance, now that the GOP has eviscerated the IRS.

And even if they're NOT full of crap, consider this: he's reporting a "massive" increase of 7,000 such registrations over last year. LLCs in this context do not, by definition, employ anyone. If we hold the rate, you might be able to say with massive optimism that 40,000 or 50,000 people might be self-employed inside these LLCs, who weren't before.

If you're looking for millions of jobs, you're going to have to look elsewhere.

And, like I said, these LLCs are being formed, in general, for tax avoidance. David Cay Johnston's "Perfectly Legal" goes into the background on these tax scams, and why so many people are getting away with them.

Ross misses the larger point that LLCs are used by small businesses and self-employed persons, and that an expansion of these would likely indicate a general rise in self-employment--which we have other figures indicating to be happening, including the fact that of the two major job creation measures used by the government, one shows far greater growth than the other--and neither measures all forms of employment.

Unemployment is going down. Welfare rolls are not massively increasing. Homelessness is not massively increasing. Bankruptcies are up a bit, but so is home ownership. Clearly, the economy isn't perfect but the notion that it's imploding is wrongheaded.

Hi Dean. I don't think the economy is imploding; it's hit a sort of fragile stability at the moment. All that GDP growth is going to have to help it soon.

What I do contend is that there is a massive difference between what this administration _projected_, and what has actually happened.

Your taxes and my taxes are higher than they need to be because we've given businesses and extremely high income people at huge tax cut. We did this because of promised jobs, plain and simple. It's not happening. There are a variety of reasons why; my gut tells me that the economy is searching for a new stance of fundamental stability. The economic natural law is adapting to globalization, and it's a painful process. We don't know what the end result is going to be.