Another dismal jobs report.
Job growth amounted to a disappointing 80,000, below analyst expectations of 90-100K, while the jobless rate remained the same at 8.2%:
Read the whole article. There’s a lot more, all of its depressing and trending downward.
While no President should be blamed entirely for the unemployment numbers, the policies of any President do have a direct influence on those numbers, and should bear some responsibility, especially in this era where we have ceded so much power to the federal government. Consider this graph (below the fold), which shows the “total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.” The steep upward swing, beginning in 2008, sadly corresponds too closely with the beginnings of the Obama administration. And it is with this administration that we have seen the worst deficits, the most regulation, and the biggest increase in the power of government in our lifetimes. It is thus no surprise the economy has crumbled.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Job growth amounted to a disappointing 80,000, below analyst expectations of 90-100K, while the jobless rate remained the same at 8.2%:
Read the whole article. There’s a lot more, all of its depressing and trending downward.
While no President should be blamed entirely for the unemployment numbers, the policies of any President do have a direct influence on those numbers, and should bear some responsibility, especially in this era where we have ceded so much power to the federal government. Consider this graph (below the fold), which shows the “total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.” The steep upward swing, beginning in 2008, sadly corresponds too closely with the beginnings of the Obama administration. And it is with this administration that we have seen the worst deficits, the most regulation, and the biggest increase in the power of government in our lifetimes. It is thus no surprise the economy has crumbled.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The president makes a speech this morning and points out that he has or his administration has “created” 4.5 million jobs and that is a step
in the right direction. But when you think about it, just getting out of bed in the morning is a step in the right direction.
Where you are judged is on what do you do after you get out of bed.
Getting out of bed is not to be praised, accomplishing something of substance is.
There is no substance.
Whether 4.5 million jobs were actually “created” or not (there’s a lot of dispute about how they arrived at that number…), there are two points that make it almost meaningless, even if true:
1) There are still 5 million MORE people unemployed than when the recession began, and 2) The government really doesn’t “create” jobs.
Relating to point #2, if they create a gov’t job, that is NOT contributing to the economy, because it’s money taken out of the free market & paid for by taxpayers, who then have even less disposable income. WIth less disposable $$ to spend, this gov’t job is actually a drag on the economy. And the money spent to supposedly help private businesses create jobs usually ends up a net LOSS – we all know the numerous examples of the Fed Gov’t pumping millions or billions into some industry (Solyndra, for example…) and in the end, each job (which averaged like $40,000 – $70,000) “cost” over a $ million each ! ! We’d have been better off just giving that money away to those who needed it (which I’m not advocating) ! !
The best way to “create” jobs is for gov’t to get out of the way, reduce taxes, and eliminate regulation that inhibits businesses from expanding & therefore hiring additional workers. What the Left repeatedly fail to grasp is that businesses don’t exist to create jobs for people – they are there to make a profit. If they can’t make a profit, they can’t hire people, and if they’re actually losing money, they go under entirely, resulting in job losses for all their employees…
The one number that is almost entirely ignored in the discussion about jobs is how many more are required each month just to break even with population growth. The last estimate I heard was 180,000. Obama has been president since January 2009, or 42 months ago. That means the economy needed to generate 7.56 million jobs just to maintain itself over that period. So even assuming Obama is telling the truth about the number of jobs his administration has created, that’s still a deficit of more than 3 million. As Nancy Pelosi expounded on the House floor when unemployment under George W. Bush shot up to 6 percent, “Where are the jobs, Mr. President?”
Yep – great point, Publius. I thought the number was closer to 200 – 225,000/mo just to stay even, but either way, even the best of recent months has not produced anything like that number of jobs. There may have been one month late last year or early this year that produced somewhere on the the order of 200,000 jobs (or so it was claimed), but that wasn’t sustained. Many of us supect the true numbers are a lot worse than the “Official” numbers we’re hearing…