Consumer Confidence Continues To Fall

For months now, we have been hearing that the worst of America’s financial crisis is over, the President’s economic stimulus package is creating millions of new jobs, we are pulling out of the recession, and so forth.

We will come back to the lies about job creation for another time.

Unemployment figures continuing to hover around ten percent show that we are still losing more jobs than are being created.

In a sign that we ar far from being out of the woods yet, Wal Mart just posted it’s first ever drop off in quarterly sales.

In the important holiday quarter ending on January 31, net sales at Walmart’s 3,400-plus US stores fell 0.5 per cent year-on-year.

The first three quarters were good for Wal Mart, largely due to the fact that it was attracting a new class of budget-minded shoppers who had not previously been part of their lower-income customer base.

Now even those folks are cutting back.

Not a positive sign.

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Spend More Money

The latest “economic stimulus” package is only a tenth of the size of the last one.

That means Washington is learning it’s lesson.

If something utterly fails to work, you don’t spend as much for it next time.

Another huge waste of money that we don’t have.

I’ll bet that the Chinese hope it works.

Seeing as how it’s their money.

Senate Democrats circulated a jobs bill Tuesday that’s light on new initiatives on boosting hiring and heavy with provisions sought by lobbyists for doctors and the satellite broadcasting industry.

The 362-page measure is still in draft form and has not been officially released. It has bipartisan backing but very few new ideas for creating jobs, other than a $10 billion plan to exempt companies from paying the employer’s share of Social Security payroll taxes for new hires if they are unemployed and hired this year.

The idea, by Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is regarded as more workable than President Barack Obama’s plan for tax credits of up to $5,000 for new hires.

The rest of the measure is mostly comprised of last year’s unfinished business, including renewal of business tax breaks that have expired, an extension of unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies and forestalling a cut in Medicare payments for doctors.

The jobs bill is politically important for Democrats seeking to respond to public anxiety about the economy. But the measure also has a lot of pull with an assortment of lobbying groups seeking to extend a raft of tax breaks and other benefits that expire at the end of the month.

The measure ignores some of Obama’s ideas, including the per-job tax credit, a $250 payment to Social Security recipients and $25 billion in help for cash-strapped states.

Instead, the cornerstone of the plan would exempt companies from paying the employer’s share of Social Security payroll taxes for new hires—as long as those people had been unemployed at least 60 days.

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Americans Are Too Stupid To Understand Obama

I’m glad that the New York Times cleared this up for me.
Here I’ve been thinking that health care reform, cap and trade and stimulus packages were just bad ideas.

Obama To Announce $8 Billion Pork Barrel Project AFTER State Of The Union Speech

There’s an old cliche that if you are trying to do something underhanded to someone, you are “railroading” them.
When it comes to railroading the American public, President Obama is about to take it up a notch.
Of course while creating tens of thousands of jobs.
All Aboard!!

A day after delivering a State of the Union address aimed at showing recession-weary Americans he understands their struggles, President Barack Obama intends to award $8 billion in stimulus funds to develop high-speed rail corridors and sell the program as a jobs creator.

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden plan to announce grants for 13 major corridors during a town hall meeting in Tampa, Fla., Thursday, the president’s first public appearance following his speech to the nation. It’s an attempt by the White House to show that getting Americans back to work is the president’s top priority and that he has a plan for how to do it.
 
The president’s visit to the region means Florida’s proposal for a high-speed line connecting Orlando and Tampa is likely to receive funding. California’s proposal for an 800-mile-long rail line from Sacramento to San Diego and a nine-state proposal in the Midwest are also considered strong contenders.
 
The $8 billion in funding for high-speed trains and other passenger rail projects is part of the $787 billion recovery act. Besides the 13 corridors receiving grants, a White House official said several smaller awards will be made for improvements to existing rail lines. Overall, 31 states will receive funds.
 
The official said the projects are expected to create or save tens of thousands of jobs in areas like track-laying, manufacturing, planning and engineering, though there is no time frame for how long it will take for those jobs to develop. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak ahead of the president’s announcement.  (Emphasis mine  Carl)

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President Obama Is Creating Jobs

President Obama is putting people to work.
That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the people he’s putting to work are people who keep track of how many people are out of work.

On Friday,President Obama made another pep-rally appearance (at taxpayer expense) in Ohio talking about, among other lies, how he is going to put America back to work.

It’s kind of ironic that this was the same day that the U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics issued a report that during the last year the unemployment rate has climbed in all 50 states.

So much for campaign promises.

I know, I know, you Kool-Aid drinkers are saying “Give the man a chance, he’s only been in office for a year.”

However, even the most die-hard Obamaites should be willing to admit that, after spending almost 800 billion dollars on a “economic stimulus” package, the job losses should have at least stayed steady, not risen.

Instead, not only have the number of people without jobs gone up all across the country, 16 states have unemployment rates of ten per cent or higher.

On the other hand, there is one small bright spot in the report.

And that is that any Republican running against Harry Reid this November can point out that Nevada, the home state of the Senate majority leader, had the second-highest job loss percentage in America over the past year.

Click here to access the jobs loss database.

President Obama Brings His Dog And Pony Show To Pennsylvania

President Obama is off on yet another whirlwind tour, his excuse this time is that he is traveling to “summits to create jobs.”

Barack Obama knows as much about creating jobs as I do about quantum physics.

Before saddling the taxpayers with the costs of his latest (sure to be) boondoggle, he had a meeting at the White House with such helpful advisors such as the CEO’s of Boeing, Comcast, AT&T and Disney.

I’m not holding my breath waiting to see the Walt Disney Company start employing people all across small town America.

Why doesn’t the President talk to some people who may actually be able to give him some advice about job creation?

Better yet, can one of you who supports the President explain to me how holding a question and answer session with a group of people who are not business owners at a community college in Pennsylvania is going to do anything to spur job creation?

I couldn’t begin to come close to the amount of resources available to President Obama.

Yet in ten minutes of doing research, I came across two Pennsylvania firms, both of them automotive, that the owners of would be able to tell the President what it takes to create jobs.

They are both family-owned firms, both started out with one location, one has grown to 26 locations throughout Northeastern Pennsylvania, the other has 53 locations that stretch from Northeast Pennsylvania to the Canadian border.

The owners of these firms are the people the President should meet with if he wants to learn something about creating jobs.

Instead, he uses the usual liberal ploy of presenting a lot of style and very little of substance.

Meanwhile, the country’s unemployment rate will continue to rise, adding millions of job losses to the already frightening number of Americans who are unemployed.

We are putting are hopes of job creation and an economic turnaroud in the hands of a President who, along with the chair of his Council of Economic Advisers, promised America that if Congress passed his stimulus plan, unemployment would rise no higher than 8 percent.

Yeah, that plan has worked out really well.

Wasn’t there someone who said something about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?

By repeating the same tactics that didn’t work before, that seems to be the President’s plan for reducing unemployment.

That and traveling around the country making speeches to crowds of unemployed people as a means of stimulating the economy.

Good luck with that one Mr. President.

 

 

Quarterly Data Series on Business Employment Dynamics

The latest jobs data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://bls.gov:

From December 2008 to March 2009 the number of job losses from closing and contracting establishments remained essentially unchanged at 8.5 million. The number of job gains from opening and expanding private sector establishments fell from 6.7 million to 5.7 million, the lowest level since the series began in 1992, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

 Gross job losses exceeded gross job gains in all but two industry sectors: utilities and education and health services.

Quarterly Extended Mass Layoffs

Courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://bls.gov

Employers initiated 1,776 extended mass layoff events that resulted in 277,924 job separations in the third quarter of 2009. The total number of events reached a record high for any third quarter. Nine major industry sectors had a record high number of events for a third quarter.

If We Can’t Save Jobs, We’ll Give Out Raises. That Counts, Right?

This weekend we will be bringing you a series of articles that may escape your notice otherwise, but that we feel are important enough that you should know about them.
I know that I paid attention in math class, yet I can’t figure out how giving someone a raise counts as a saved job.
Maybe Charlie Rangel could explain it to me, he’s good with numbers.
As long as they aren’t his own.

 WASHINGTON (AP) – The government’s latest count of stimulus jobs significantly overstates the effects of the $787 billion program under a popular federal preschool program, raising fresh questions about the process the Obama administration is using to tout the success of its economic recovery plan.

An Associated Press review of the latest stimulus reports – which the White House promised would undergo extensive reviews to ensure accuracy – found that more than two-thirds of 14,506 jobs credited to the recovery act under spending by just one federal office were overstated because they counted pay increases for existing workers as jobs saved.

The inflated job count is at least partly the product of the administration instructing local community agencies that received money to count the raises as jobs saved.

“That’s more than ridiculous,” said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner.

 

Most of the inflated figures were like those cited in the 935 saved jobs reported by the Southwest Georgia Community Action in Moultrie, Ga. The agency, like hundreds of others collecting Head Start money, claimed all its existing employees’ jobs were saved because they received a pay raise with the stimulus cash.

Similar claims led to overstating by more than 9,300 the number of jobs saved with more than $323 million in stimulus money distributed by the Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, the AP’s review found.

More than 250 other community agencies in the U.S. similarly reported saving jobs when using the money to give pay raises, pay for training and continuing education, extend employee work hours or buy equipment, according to their spending reports.

The Georgia program inflated the numbers even further by claiming the recovery money saved more jobs than the number of people it actually employs. The agency employs 508 people but claimed 935 jobs were saved because of confusion over government reports.

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Employment Situation

The latest unemployment numbers issued today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In October, the unemployment rate rose to 10.2 percent, the highest since April 1983, and nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline (-190,000). The largest job losses over the month were in construction, manufacturing, and retail trade.

Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers in October, 2009 is 17.5 percent.

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