Unemployment
May 13, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Today the Minnesota Senate passed a bill authorizing gay marriage which will be signed into law by our governor, Mark Dayton. That is the context for this text, which my oldest daughter sent me a few minutes ago: If I had a dollar for every #time4marriage hashtag on my feed I’d be rich. Someone should start a #time4jobs trend, seeing as there are approx. twice as many unemployed Americans as
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April 6, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
The White House, through economist turned flack Alan Krueger, wasted no time in blaming yesterday’s lousy jobs report on the sequester. It’s a ridiculous claim. As we observed, government employment held steady, and the sequester is too recent to have affected the private sector. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, who is frequently cited by the Obama administration, agrees that the sequester is not yet in play. Zandi told CNBC:
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April 5, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Senator Jeff Sessions released this statement about today’s disappointing jobs numbers: Today’s jobs report reveals that 90 million Americans are now outside the labor force. We need to be getting Americans back to work, helping people move off of food stamps and welfare, and find good jobs with steady incomes. But the comprehensive immigration bill being drafted right now would provide nearly immediate work authorization to millions of illegal immigrants
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April 5, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
The latest government jobs reports finds that only 88,000 jobs were added in March. That’s half of the 12 month average and less than half of what most experts expected. The unemployment rate actually declined slightly to 7.6 percent. This is the result of the decrease of folks looking for work. The labor-force participation rate dropped from 63.5 percent to dropped to 63.3 percent, its lowest point since 1978, according
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April 3, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Under President Obama, the old normal unemployment rate in the former Western Europe — around 8 percent — seems to have become the new normal in the United States. I guess there’s at least poetic justice in this, since leading Democrats like Obama and John Kerry tend to see Western Europe as a model for the U.S. Unfortunately, though, the new normal unemployment rate in Europe is much higher than
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February 19, 2013 — John Hinderaker
John Cochrane of the University of Chicago and Stanford said it succinctly: Once upon a time, the minimum wage, like free trade, was a basic test of whether you were awake in the first week of econ 1. We put a horizontal line in a supply and demand graph. Minimum wages increase unemployment of poor people. Yes, that fact was once considered so obvious that, if I recall correctly, both
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February 16, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Megan McArdle makes this point in the context of the minimum wage, but it is one that I have tried to make a couple of times in the context of Obama’s many and varied employment-suppressing policies generally: The thing about unemployment is that it’s much, much worse than having a crap low-wage job. It’s worse than almost anything. It’s one of those life events that people never really recover from.
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January 23, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The Associated Press has undertaken an ambitious series of reports on the rotten U.S. and global economies. To its credit, the AP recognizes that our current recovery is, by any historical standard, awful: In the U.S., the economic recovery that started in June 2009 has been called the third straight “jobless recovery.” But that’s a misnomer. The jobs came back after the first two. Most recessions since World War II
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January 4, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Now that the election is over, most of us don’t wait quite as breathlessly for the monthly job reports; nor is the media’s urge to spin them quite as strong. But the reports remain consequential and the temptation to spin remains strong. Today’s report shows that employers added 155,000 jobs in December 2012. The unemployment rate for December was 7.8 percent, unchanged from November (the November rate originally was 7.7
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December 7, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Superficially, the November jobs report doesn’t look bad. Non-farm jubs increased by almost 150,000 and the unemployment rate dropped to a four year low of 7.7 percent. Viewed with a little more sophistication, the report looks worse. 150,000 new jobs isn’t very impressive. And the drop in the unemployment rate stems from the large number of Americans who stopped looking for work. In fact, the deeper one drills down, the
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October 30, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Despite initial suggestions to the contrary, it now appears that the U.S. government’s jobs report for October will issue on Friday, as scheduled. Earlier, it was thought that the disruption likely to be caused by Hurricane Sandy in the Washington, D.C. area might well prevent the timely preparation of the report, and there was even speculation no report would be released until after the election. Hurricane Sandy did disrupt the
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October 15, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Michelle Obama says we are “in the midst of a huge recovery.” That claim is laughable to anyone who has lived through the last four years; this simple chart from the Senate Budget Committee highlights one of the central failings of Obamanomics: people are leaving the labor force faster than they are entering it. Since Obama became president ten times as many people have been added to the roster of
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October 7, 2012 — Scott Johnson
I’ve written a few times about “the real unemployment” that is bedeviling the country as a result of Barack Obama’s destructive policies. My previous comments should be supplemented by Elizabeth MacDonald’s Fox Business column of this past Friday on “The real unemployment rate.” Now comes Americans For Prosperity with a powerful political ad titled “The Dinner Table.” It is an ad that captures something of the widespread suffering I mean
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October 5, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
In the post immediately below, I offered my view on the Labor Department’s jobs report, which says that the unemployment rate dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent last month. In sum, the purported improvement indicated by these numbers appears to have little or no basis in reality. Mitt Romney responded quickly to the report: This is not what a real recovery looks like. We created fewer jobs in September
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October 5, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Today, the Labor Department reported that the jobless rate in the U.S. dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent last month. This is the lowest rate in approximately three and a half years. But there’s a problem with the report: it doesn’t make sense. As Kevin Hassett points out, the 114,000 net jobs created in September is well below the average for this year (146,000) and the average for last
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September 11, 2012 — John Hinderaker
In speeches, President Obama touts his administration’s supposed success in creating private sector jobs. Those who have lived through the last four years of high unemployment and economic stagnation naturally wonder whether Obama’s numbers can possibly be correct. To answer that question, you have to pay careful attention to how Obama phrases his claim: Our businesses have gone back to basics and created over 4 million jobs in the last
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September 9, 2012 — Scott Johnson
You may recall that the dismal August jobs report reflected a decline in the unemployment rate from 8.3 to 8.1 percent. Funny how that works, however, as Conn Carroll points out: “The U.S. economy actually lost jobs according to the survey the Labor Department uses to calculate the unemployment rate. And not for the first time. The U.S. workforce has declined for each of the last two months as has
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