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Another Jobs Report Disappoints: 113,000 New Jobs, Unemployment Rate to 6.6 Percent

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner The Labor Department’s jobs report disappointed for a second consecutive month Friday, bringing the news that the U.S. created just 113,000 jobs in January, as the unemployment rate fell to 6.6 percent.

December’s even weaker job report was little revised, from 74,000 to 75,000.

Friday’s jobs number fell short of expectations, which were for 180,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate to hold steady at 6.7 percent

The report contained few indications, however, that the drop in the unemployment rate in January was due to out-of-work Americans continuing to quit the job hunt and leave the ranks of those counted as unemployed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey. The labor force participation rate ticked up from a multi-decade low of 62.8 percent to 63 percent. A broader rate of unemployment, which reflects those forced into part-time work or only marginally attached to the labor force, fell from 13.1 to 12.8 percent.

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Video: Andrea Mitchell Warns Keystone Pipeline Would Ruin Obama’s ‘Climate Change Legacy’

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Photo Credit: MRC On her 1 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show on Monday, host Andrea Mitchell warned that President Obama would endanger his reputation with left-wing environmentalists if he dared to approve the Keystone Pipeline: “It goes very much against the legacy, the climate change legacy of not only Barack Obama, but [Secretary of State] John Kerry has spent his whole life devoted to working on these environmental issues and all of his allies are really against this.” [Listen to the audio]

Mitchell began by observing that a new State Department report on the proposed oil pipeline “basically said there is going to be a bad effect on climate change whether they build this pipeline or not” and would give “some political cover to the President and Secretary Kerry if they want to go the route of building the pipeline.”

On Friday’s NBC Nightly News, Mitchell hyped environmentalist opposition to the project and efforts to discredit the newly-released study.

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ObamaCare Could Lead to Loss of Nearly 2.3 Million US Jobs, Report Says

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsThe long-term effect of ObamaCare on the U.S. economy was rewritten Tuesday with the Congressional Budget Office issuing a revised projection that nearly 2.5 million workers could opt out of full-time jobs over the next 10 years — allowing employers to wipe 2.3 million full-time jobs off the books.

Budget experts say that because ObamaCare offers an insurance alternative to employer provided coverage, many Americans who hold full-time jobs may decide to work part-time — or not at all — and get their coverage from the exchanges.

Following the release of the report, House Speaker John Boehner said the report showed how “the middle class is getting squeezed in this economy.”

The report drew immediate reaction from GOP lawmakers, including House Speaker John Boehner who said the report indicates ObamaCare is only making it harder for middle-class Americans to survive in the bad economy.

Others, like Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., weighed in.

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Long-Term Jobless Facing New Year Without Aid

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Photo Credit: Tax Credits/flickr

Photo Credit: Tax Credits/flickr

Over a million out-of-work Americans will be ringing in the new year with a lot more uncertainty about the future.

Jobless benefits are slated to expire this weekend for 1.3 million people who receive the long-term federal aid payments that kick in after state insurance payments run out. The emergency benefits, which were instituted during the 2008 recession, allowed many individuals to receive benefits for up to 99 weeks while seeking work. While the program has been extended 11 times, lawmakers failed to reach a year-end agreement to maintain it.

The lapse means more than just fewer presents under the tree for unemployed people like Nancy Connelly-Cumming, a single mother who lives in Newbury Park, Calif.

She’s been looking for work since losing her job at a nonprofit group in September 2012. “Absolutely, I couldn’t have survived this long without an unemployment benefit,” she told NBC News. “That was definitely what kept me going.”

Connelly-Cumming said she’s been applying for minimum-wage jobs and that she fears losing her home if she stops receiving her aid. “I don’t want my children to know,” she said. “They’re 16 and 14 and they’re pretty aware of what’s going on but I don’t want them to come to the realization that we might not have this home in a couple of months. I don’t want them to know that. They don’t have to worry. That’s my job.”

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1,148,000 Fewer Americans Have Jobs Today Than 7 Yrs Ago

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

Photo Credit: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

1,148,000 fewer Americans held jobs this November than did seven years ago in November 2006, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Back then, according to BLS, 145,534,000 Americans held jobs. This November, according to BLS, only 144,386,000 Americans hold jobs. That is a drop of 1,148,000 in the number of Americans working.

This decline in the number of Americans who actually have jobs has come even though the size of the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population and the size of the nation’s civilian labor force have both grown significantly over the last seven years.

The civilian noninstitutional population is made up of all people 16 or older who are living in the United States and are not in the military or a prison, mental facility or nursing home. The civilian labor force consists of all people in the civilian noninstitutional population who either have a job or who actively sought a job in the past four weeks.

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White House: Obama Won’t Insist on Jobless Aid in Budget Deal

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

The White House will not insist that an emerging budget deal include an extension of the unemployment benefits program set to expire at the end of the year, press secretary Jay Carney said on Friday.

Carney said that it would be “terrible to tell more than a million families across the country just a few days after Christmas that they’re out of benefits,” but that the White House was agnostic on how the extension happened.

“The vehicle that they use to do that is less important than the fact that they do it,” Carney said.

The statement from Carney echoed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who said Thursday that an extension of the jobless benefits did not have to be included in a budget deal to win Democratic support.

“Hopefully, it could be part of the budget, but it doesn’t have to be part of the budget,” Pelosi said. “It could be on its own vehicle, as it goes forward, but it’s something we must consider.”

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Timber Industry Suffers as Loggers Blame Federal Regs for Lost Jobs

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Photo Credit: Fox

Photo Credit: Fox

The Rough and Ready Sawmill was an institution in southern Oregon for 91 years. Its lumber helped fuel the post-World War II building boom and settle the rural West. Now, it sits empty, the last of 22 mills in Josephine County to shut down for good, signaling the end of an era.

For Ivan Cross, it’s the end of the only job he’s ever had.

“I haven’t drawn an unemployment check in 43-and-a-half years,” said Cross. “Now, that’s what I do for a living.”

While Rough and Ready sits in the middle of America’s richest timber country, the federal government owns 80 percent of the land. Many in these decimated small towns blame The Endangered Species Act, which paved the way for a flood of lawsuits blocking federal timber sales, because of an endangered species in the region.

“You just can’t run a business, no matter how you adapt, if you don’t have the raw materials and the log supply to run that business,” said Link Phillippi, owner of Rough and Ready.

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Illegal Aliens Awaiting Deportation Got Preferred Jobs in U.S. Prisons

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Federal Prison Industries (FPI), the government-owned corporation that operates factories in federal prisons, employed 37 inmates as of June 2012 who had been issued final deportation orders and were therefore ineligible for FPI employment.

Although those 37 illegal alien inmates represented less than one percent of Federal Prison Industries’ total inmate employees, the audit shows a “weakness in FPI’s internal controls,” says a recent report from the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG).

“We found that FPI’s internal controls did not ensure that aliens who were ordered deported were removed from FPI employment as required,” the report said.

Federal Prison Industries says once the matter came to its attention, it immediately removed 35 of the 37 deportable inmates from FPI employment. Of the remaining two inmates, one claimed he had been misidentified, and one had already stopped working at FPI.

Of the 12,394 inmates FPI employed as of June 2012, 1,580 (approximately 13 percent) were not U.S. citizens, but only 37 had received final deportation orders, which should have precluded them from holding FPI jobs.

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Pelosi: Part Time Jobs Are Liberating, Now Go Pursue Your Passion – Broke and Hungry (+video)

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pelosi_spendingAs America runs headlong towards joining the ranks of the banana republics of the world, it’s nice to see that our leadership is embracing a third world work ethic for all Americans. In an interview this past Sunday, one of our nation’s greatest arguments for term limits was on TV, babbling almost incoherently and defying us to try to follow her contorted logic.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is fresh back from schmoozing with the world’s financial elite at the wedding of George Soros, the currency killer. Naturally, she’s chocked full of empathy for people trying to make ends meet and facing the reality of part time “obamajobs” being the only employment out there as a result of the impending doom that is obamacare.

But, according to Nancy, that is a good thing. She looks at work as if it is a burden that she and her other deranged know-nothings in the Democrat party are rescuing us from. Now, since we no longer have the option of working forty hours a week, we have all kinds of free time to spend pursuing happiness.

Not the happiness that comes with being able to provide for your family or enjoy dining out or a movie, those non-essential life-enhancing things, no, she’s talking about the happiness that comes with sitting around doing nothing, you know, Democrat happiness.

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Initial Jobless Claims Slump Due to Underreporting by Two States (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

Photo Credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

Jobless claims in the U.S. declined last week to the lowest level since April 2006 as work on computer systems in two states caused those employment agencies to report fewer applications.

First-time claims for unemployment insurance fell by 31,000 to 292,000 in the week ended Sept. 7, which also included the Labor Day holiday, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for 330,000 applications.

The decrease in filings doesn’t signal a change in job-market conditions because most of it was caused by computer-network conversions in the two states, according to a Labor Department spokesman. The pace of job cuts has waned since the end of last year, setting the stage for faster payroll and income growth that would help propel consumer spending.

“Stronger job growth may be on the horizon,” said Millan Mulraine, director of U.S. rates research at TD Securities in New York. “When we start seeing improvement in the labor market, I think that will provide another tailwind for confidence, and spending, going forward.”

Stocks were little changed as investors weighed the prospect for cuts in Federal Reserve stimulus and watched developments on Syria. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell less than 0.1 percent to 1,688.54 at 11:01 a.m. in New York.

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