Archive for category Unemployment
The Decline: The Geography of a Recession
Posted by Richard Warnick in American People, Bush Failures, Capitalism, Disaster, Economy, National Politics, Unemployment on August 17, 2010
Geographers love maps. Maps are one of the best forms of communication ever devised. But sometimes maps can be very, very frightening…
Multi-temporal map animation by LaToya Egwuekwe
According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are nearly 31 million people currently unemployed — that’s including those involuntarily working part time and those who want a job, but have given up on trying to find one. In the face of the worst economic upheaval since the Great Depression, millions of Americans are hurting. “The Decline: The Geography of a Recession,” as created by labor writer LaToya Egwuekwe, serves as a vivid representation of just how much. Watch the deteriorating transformation of the U.S. economy from January 2007 — approximately one year before the start of the recession — to the most recent unemployment data available today.
Note: This map displays the so-called U3 unemployment statistic, which doesn’t account for the underemployed and those who’ve simply given up looking for work. The real measure of unemployment is approximately double the U3 numbers.
h/t HuffPo
UPDATE: Glenn Beck’s advice to his unemployed fellow Americans: “Go out and get a job.” (Beck’s job pays $25 million a year — nice work if you can get it. No college degree required, either.)
UPDATE: Death and Joblessness: Suicide Dogs the Long-Term Unemployed. What Can Be Done to Help Them?
UPDATE: Initial Jobless Claims the Latest Indicator in Support of a Double Dip
Initial Jobless Claims for the week ending August 14th came in at a seasonally adjusted 500,000, the highest level since November 2009.
…That begs the question of whether the NBER’s reluctance to call an official end to the great recession means that the NBER thinks it never really ended.
The Curved World: Redressing Economic Disparity and Maintaining Transparency
Posted by Glenden Brown in Bailout, Deficit, Economy, Poverty, Society, Tax Policy, This Blog, Unemployment on August 17, 2010
David Smick’s The World Is Curved is one of the better books about the financial crisis of 2008. Despite Smick’s tendency to name drop (and it’s difficult to not get the impression Smick is the financial world’s Forrest Gump) the book is a brilliant and incisive analysis of the current state of both politics and economics. Smick tackles a wide array of issues in what is a relatively easy read (330 pages, and it goes quickly). After first laying out the paradoxical history of the massive entrepreneurial experiment of the last 30 years (it has simultaneously lifted millions of people out of poverty but has also led to increasingly disparity), Smick tackles the debacle of the 2008 financial collapse. Reading Smick’s account, it’s impossible to escape the reminder of how close the world came to a complete economic shutdown. From the book’s site, Smick has this to say about the future: Read the rest of this entry »
Bush’s ‘Ownership Society’ – Wiping Out the Middle Class
Posted by Richard Warnick in American People, Bailout, Bush Administration, Capitalism, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Economy, National Politics, Poverty, This Blog, Unemployment on July 27, 2010
Yesterday I got my annual property tax assessment in the mail. When President Bush’s so-called “ownership society” collapsed, the value of the house I live in plunged 40 percent in one year. Now it has come back up a few thousand dollars to the market price from eight years ago.
The “ownership society” was a right-wing article of faith, but the hard reality is most Americans got owned. By the politicians, by the banks, by the corporations. I’m actually one of the lucky ones, because I don’t owe more on my house than it’s worth– and I still have a job.
From Michael Snyder, Business Insider:
22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America
- 83% of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1% of the people.
- 61% of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49% in 2008 and 43% in 2007.
- 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
- 36% of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
- A staggering 43% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
- 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
- Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32% increase over 2008.
- Only the top 5% of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
- For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
- In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to 1.
- As of 2007, the bottom 80% of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
- The bottom 50% of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1% of the nation’s wealth.
- Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17% when compared with 2008.
- In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
- The top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
- In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
- More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
- For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
- This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
- Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16% to 7.8 million in 2009.
- Approximately 21% of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.
- The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income.
What are the Republicans proposing now that the “ownership society” has been exposed as a fraud? They want to raise taxes on what’s left of the middle class to pay for more tax cuts for the rich, and more corporate tax cuts.
UPDATE: On Walking Away: Is Strategic Default All That’s Left to Stressed Homeowners?
How Can We Stop the Catfood Commission?
Posted by Richard Warnick in Deficit, Democrats, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Economy, National Politics, This Blog, Unemployment, congress on July 23, 2010
It is absolutely beyond the Republicans’ power to cut Social Security, even if they re-take the House and Senate in November, since Obama will continue to wield veto power. The real impetus for Social Security cuts is from the “Deficit Commission” which Obama created in January by Executive Order, then stacked with people (including its bipartisan co-Chairs) who have long favored slashing the program, and whose recommendations now enjoy the right of an up-or-down vote in Congress after the November election, thanks to the recent maneuvering by Nancy Pelosi. The desire to cut Social Security is fully bipartisan (otherwise it couldn’t happen) and pushed by the billionaire class that controls the Government.
If the Catfood Commission proposes a bill slashing Social Security and Medicare benefits and it comes to the House floor, Republicans and Blue Dog Dems will vote for it. Even if all the progressive-leaning Democrats oppose it on a straight vote, it will probably pass. Millions of retirees will fall out of the middle class into poverty.
Jon Walker on FDL thinks that House progressives can threaten to remove Rep. Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House if she allows such a vote. That does not seem likely. IMHO if they had that kind of cojones then Bush would have been impeached and health care would include a public option.
Here’s the question. How can we stop the Catfood Commission?
Related One Utah post:
Budget Priorities Left to Catfood Commission (July 6)
Hey, Senator Hatch: Unemployment Insurance Is Paid For Already
Posted by Richard Warnick in Economy, Federal Budget, National Politics, Orrin Hatch, Republicans, Tax Policy, Tea Bag Party, This Blog, Unemployment, Utah Politics on July 20, 2010
Source: Calculated Risk
WASHINGTON (AP) Millions of people stuck on the jobless rolls would receive an extension of unemployment benefits averaging $309 a week under a Senate bill that appears set to break free of a Republican filibuster.
But Senator Orrin Hatch hates to let go of that money. He’s a born-again deficit hawk. (Or maybe he’s just running scared from the Tea Partyers).
“What the president isn’t telling the American people is that many of us in the Senate are fighting to make sure our children and grandchildren aren’t buried under a mountain of debt,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. “If we are going to extend unemployment benefits, then let’s do it without adding to our record debt.”
Last December, Senator Hatch explained why he voted for the Bush administration’s deficit spending, deficits that doubled the National Debt in eight years. Under Bush, “it was standard practice not to pay for things,” he said.
What Senator Hatch isn’t telling the American people is there’s a reason why Congress has always routinely extended unemployment benefits (before the Party of NO appeared on Capitol Hill last year). They don’t add to the National Debt because they’re already financed by state and federal payroll taxes.
The unemployment insurance system is jointly operated by the state and federal governments. Under the Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA), the federal tax rate is 6.2% of taxable wages applied to the first $7,000 of income. Most of the federal payroll tax can be offset by state unemployment taxes, which vary from state to state, as do the benefits.
Over the long run, unemployment is funded by a dedicated revenue stream. It’s paid for.
UPDATE: Unemployment: Report Says Jobs Hole Could Persist For A Decade
UPDATE: David Dayen on FDL:
This extends benefits through November, only four months away. The White House has said they would fight for an additional extension if, as expected, unemployment does not recover significantly. So we’ll have this fight all over again soon. But Democrats basically lost this round…
UPDATE: Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) had this to say about his Republican colleagues:
“They voted for Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, charged it to our grandchildren, didn’t pay for it,” he said. They “voted for the giveaway or bailouts to drug and insurance companies in the name of Medicare privatization, charged it to our grandchildren, didn’t pay for it.
“And now they’re saying, because these are laid off workers who have done the right thing for most of their lives and now need some help, that we can’t provide it for them. It’s terrible public policy.”
Hope is Fading Away
Posted by Richard Warnick in Barack Obama, Civil liberties Infringement, Democrats, Disaster, Economy, Health Care, National Politics, Party Politics, This Blog, Unemployment on July 16, 2010
John Harris and Jim VandeHei yesterday wrote a Politico article in which unnamed White House functionaries complain that the administration isn’t getting enough credit for bringing the change promised in the 2008 campaign.
Digby offers a few thoughts that are obvious to those of us outside the Beltway:
First of all, the central premise seems to be that liberals should be happy that Obama has “gotten something done” without regard to what that “something” is. But the fact is that professional politicians always rattle off a legislative laundry list while activists care about process, politics and policy — and average voters only care about the results.
…Therefore, his political advisers should know that when the country is still reeling from unemployment and foreclosures after nearly two years, the passage of an inadequate stimulus bill, which unrealistic benchmarks and a giddy victory party ensured would be the only chance they got, the only people who will consider that a “success” would be beltway insiders. They should have realized that a health care bill that nobody in their right minds would have designed from scratch, the worst aspects of which liberals will be asked to defend for years to come, would be met with dampened enthusiasm by those who watched the process devolve from a sense of progressive purpose to an exhausting farce. They are expected to be able to predict that financial reform without accountability for what’s gone before, combined with the administration’s unwillingness to confront the civil liberties abuses of the last administration — indeed expanding on them in some cases — would show a lack of fundamental concern for justice among those who care about such things.
Since the Village is essentially a Republican town perhaps they assumed that liberals were all going to be the same dead-enders the Bush cultists were, defending their man until the day he was out of office (and then insisting they never liked him in the first place). That’s what “little people” (and paid political hacks) are supposed to do. But liberals are not known for cultlike devotion to their leaders — ask Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter.
Like I said, some things are obvious outside the Beltway.
Budget Priorities Left to Catfood Commission
Posted by Richard Warnick in Deficit, Democrats, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Economy, National Politics, This Blog, Unemployment on July 6, 2010
The country’s best known Nobel economist, Paul Krugman, put it plainly: “[P]enny-pinching in the midst of a severely depressed economy is no way to deal with our long-run budget problems.”
Democrats aren’t listening to Krugman. The House just passed a “budget enforcement resolution” that didn’t actually contain a budget, but did call for a spending cap of $1.12 trillion. That means $7 billion will probably have to be carved out of existing domestic spending. The bloated Department of Defense budget plus supplemental funding for Iraq and Afghanistan are exempt from cuts.
How do they propose to eliminate $7 billion in non-military spending? The details were left to President Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission (aka the Catfood Commission), which is supposed to report a long-term budget plan by December.
The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was established with little fanfare last February. It is stacked with prominent advocates of drastic cuts to social programs, including Social Security and Medicare. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky, most people have forgotten President Clinton’s plan to raid the Social Security Trust Fund for the benefit of Wall Street. Now it’s back.
There is no way the Catfood Commission is going to recommend raising taxes on the rich, quickly bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, or creating jobs for 15 million unemployed Americans. Those measures would balance the federal budget, but they wouldn’t benefit Wall Street as much as privatizing Social Security.
Marie Antoinette never said “let ‘em eat catfood.” But she was in favor of balancing the budget on the backs of low-income people, and that’s what the Catfood Commission is all about.
UPDATE: The hand wringing about $7 billion in budget cuts is astounding when you stop to think that’s ONE PERCENT of military spending. Also, the federal government hands out more than $4.5 billion a year to the oil & gas industry in tax subsidies alone (this does not include the federal leases auctioned off at bargain prices).
“The financial crisis has made us permanently poorer”
Posted by Glenden Brown in Bailout, Deficit, Economy, Poverty, Unemployment on May 16, 2010
Paul Krugman responded to the IMF report Navigating the Fiscal Challenges Ahead, arguing that the report is probably too technocratic to be properly understood by the people who need to properly understand it.
It takes careful reading to discover what’s really going on:
The persistence of deficits reflects permanent revenue losses, primarily from a steep decline in potential GDP during the crisis, but also due to the impact of lower asset prices and financial sector profits.
Aha. Most people who look at the IMF report will, I suspect, read it as telling a tale of government profligacy getting us into a hole. But what the report actually says is quite different: it says that the financial crisis has made us permanently poorer, which among other things reduces revenue, and governments have to tighten their belts to make up for that loss.[snip]
Anyway, back to the report and how it reads: my guess is that most readers won’t get, at all, the real story the IMF is telling — because that story is in effect hidden in the fine print. So the report isn’t literally misinformation, but in practice it’s likely have that effect.
30 Million Americans Jobless or Underemployed
Posted by Richard Warnick in Bush Administration, Disaster, Economy, George W. Bush, National Politics, This Blog, Unemployment on February 23, 2010
Just a reminder that the real unemployment rate is roughly double the percentage of unemployed you usually hear about in the media.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Nearly 20 percent of the U.S. workforce lacked adequate employment in January and struggled to make ends meet with reduced resources and bleak job prospects, according to a Gallup poll released on Tuesday.
In findings that appear to paint a darker employment picture than official U.S. data, Gallup estimated that about 30 million Americans are underemployed, meaning either jobless or able to find only part-time work.
Underemployed people spent 36 percent less on household purchases than their fully employed neighbors in January, while six out of 10 were not hopeful about their chances of finding adequate work in the coming month, the poll said.
Gallup surveyed more than 20,000 U.S. adults from January 2 to 31. The results have a 1 percentage point margin of error.
UPDATE: In Washington, the Party of NO is blocking the extension of unemployment benefits. One Republican sneeringly called unemployed Americans “hobos.”
UPDATE: The Senate recessed for the weekend without extending unemployment funding. Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) single-handedly blocked a vote to prevent an estimated 1.2 million American workers from prematurely losing their unemployment benefits next month. “Tough shit,” said Bunning.
Mr. President, Please Pick a Side
Posted by Richard Warnick in American People, Bailout, Barack Obama, Democracy, Democrats, Disaster, Economy, Federal Budget, National Politics, Unemployment on February 10, 2010
Are President Obama and the Democrats on the side of Wall Street or Main Street? We want to know, because there is an election this year.
Wall Street billionaires nearly crashed the global economy, and took us into a Great Recession that began in December 2007. Total catastrophe was averted at the cost of richly rewarding the very people who caused the breakdown of our financial sector, at taxpayer expense. More than two years later the U.S., rescued from the brink of depression, has begun an L-shaped jobless recovery.
Meanwhile on Main Street, the average duration of unemployment has surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. For every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work. The country is potentially looking at a “lost decade” as unemployment gradually eases.
Today, Bloomberg reports that President Obama says he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”
“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”
Of course, there is no “free-market system” on post-bailout Wall Street. And 98 percent of Americans make less than $250,000 a year, while the wealthiest two percent call the shots in Washington. So it’s understandable that the President’s remarks have caused an uproar.
It must be nice to be buddies with the President of the United States, and to collect billions of dollars from the federal treasury with no strings attached. But most of us can’t relate. Some of us might be nurturing a grudge, even.
Worth reading:
How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America by Don Peck, The Atlantic.
UPDATE: The White House issued a clarification, which explains that President Obama’s pro-Wall-Street remark isn’t the least bit inconsistent with his previous pro-Wall-Street rhetoric. How reassuring for average Americans.
UPDATE: David Dayen comments on FDL:
It doesn’t exactly help fix the problem, expressed by Paul Krugman, that it’s politically tone-deaf to say nice things about the banksters at this stage, and that calling the financial industry “the free-market system” at this stage neglects the historic level of support still being given to it by the federal government.
UPDATE: See below for an interview of Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) on “The Ed Show.” Rep. Grayson points out the difference between the actual free market system and the Wall Street “heads we win, tails you lose” system.
Read the rest of this entry »
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