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Video: Maxine Waters – ‘Over 170 Million Jobs Could Be Lost’ Due To Sequestration

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photo credit: NESRIThe mainstream media seems to have totally ignored this bit of genius from a prominent member of the House Democrats.

Representative Maxine Waters wants us all to know just how devastating sequestration is going to be for the American worker. According to the good Representative, if the scheduled cuts are allowed to go forward, there will be 170 million jobs lost.

Perhaps it would be helpful if someone on Ms Waters’ staff could inform her that there aren’t that many gainfully employed Americans. Presumably, that would make her calculations a little bit off.

See video:

Who Killed The Middle Class?

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Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey “It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class.” So said Barack Obama in his State of the Union address.

And for one of his ideas to reignite that engine, Republicans applauded. “And tonight, I am announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union – because trade that is free and fair across the Atlantic supports millions of good-paying American jobs.”

One wonders if any of those in the hall who rose robotically at the phrase “free and fair” were aware of the trade results just in from 2012. What were the 2012 figures for the European Union?

U.S. exports to Europe fell, imports from Europe rose, and our trade deficit with the EU shot up 16 percent to $116 billion. We ran a trade deficit with Italy of $20 billion, with Ireland of $25 billion, with Germany of $60 billion. The Europeans are eating our lunch.

What about South Korea, the country with whom we signed a free-trade deal in 2012? U.S. exports to Korea fell last year, and due to a surge in imports our trade deficit in goods with South Korea soared 25 percent to $16.6 billion.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Anti-Stimulus Economists Agree: Unemployment Benefits Hurt Employment Rates

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Photo Credit: APUnemployment insurance and other forms of government benefits act as a disincentive to work, economists across the political spectrum agree.

Three different economic experts testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Job Creation, and Regulatory Affairs on Thursday afternoon during a heated and contentious hearing. All said that government benefits that kick in during unemployment decrease the economic incentive to pursue work, although they disagreed about the extent of the benefits’ effect.

“The focus of today’s hearing is on the unintended consequences that too often stem from well-intentioned policies,” said Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) in his opening statement for the hearing, “Unintended Consequences: Is Government Effectively Addressing the Unemployment Crisis?”

Casey Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and author of a recent book on the effect that safety net programs have had on employment, argued that the government’s expansion of assistance programs in the wake of the recession actually has made it financially harmful to return to work in some cases.

He called the loss of benefits caused by employment the “job acceptance penalty,” and noted that a high penalty—100 percent of profit in some cases—is associated with low employment rates.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Broke, Retreating State of Our Union

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Photo Credit: National Review It is terribly appropriate that President Obama gave his halting and graceless State of the Union address on Mardi Gras: He spent the evening shouting “Laissez les bons temps rouler!” at every liberal constituency in sight, promising new spending for public-sector unions (“Fix-It-First”), demanding (yet again) that banks renegotiate mortgages on politically driven terms, offering handouts to Al Gore–style enviropreneurs (reviving cap-and-trade, offering yet more subsidies to politically connected energy firms), and promising a $9-an-hour minimum wage.

In the real world, Fat Tuesday is followed by Ash Wednesday and a season of fasting and penance. For the free-spending Barack Obama, Fat Tuesday is followed by Fat Wednesday, Fat Thursday, Fat Friday, fat federal spending the whole way through. (Don’t tell the first lady.) Austerity is reserved for the taxpayer, the so-called rich on whom the president just secured tax increases before demanding, two minutes later, yet more tax increases. That includes new taxes on Medicare recipients (“ask more from the wealthiest seniors”).

Exhibiting the new liberal vogue for jingoism, the president blamed our economic straits on China three times in the first part of the speech, turned up his nose at imported cars, and abominated the always-popular scourge of “foreign oil.” (Blast you, Canada!) But a $9-an-hour minimum wage is a boon to a Chinese manufacturing sector still dependent upon cheap labor, and expensive emission controls make overseas industries relatively competitive, while one of the biggest threats to U.S.-made cars and U.S.-produced oil is the raft of new environmental regulations the president says he wishes to see enacted.

The high-income may sigh at the tax proposals, but the president’s proposals weigh particularly heavily upon the low-income young. They will have to pay his debt. They will also be the ones most affected by the proposal to raise the minimum wage: The result of artificial wages increases, as economists have documented over and over, is fewer jobs. The president proposes to cut the bottom rung off the economic ladder, which is of much more concern to those born at the bottom.

The president has a strange sense of language. The word “economy” used to be a synonym for “thrift.” Barack Obama has managed to turn that on its head. His speech gave every indication that he remains a hostage to the superstition that we can spend our way to national prosperity — or that we can pass laws that will force employers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and other businesses to spend our way to prosperity for us. That has failed for four years because it is bad economics and wishful thinking.

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Fox News Poll: Voters Back Spending Cuts To Boost Economy By Huge Margins

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Photo Credit: J Pat CarterBy massive margins, voters say they would rather see the government cut spending than increase it as a way to boost the nation’s economy, according to a Fox News poll that showed, in hindsight, voters largely saying the 2009 stimulus did not work.

The poll showed that, by a 60-34 percent margin, voters say President Obama’s $800 billion strategy for pulling the American economy out of its one-and-a-half year long recession did not deliver on its promise. While more than half of Democrats said they thought the stimulus worked, 87 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Independents said they thought it did not.

Opposition to another round of stimulus runs two-to-one, according to the poll. This could be because 73 percent of voters polled say cutting government spending would be more likely to help strengthen the nation’s economy — as opposed to just 15 percent who believe increasing spending would do the trick.

While Obama reportedly has said he doesn’t believe the government has a spending problem, the poll showed that out of 13 issues tested, more voters are “extremely” concerned about government spending than any other issue.

Even a majority of Democrats — 55 percent — agreed that cutting spending is the way to help the economy. Ninety-one percent of Republicans held that view.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Recovery: January Unemployment Rises to 7.9%

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Photo Credit: Susan Trigg The new year started off with an old story: Employment grew again in January but not at a pace able to lower the jobless rate.

Nonfarm payrolls rose 157,000 for the first month of 2013 while the unemployment rate edged higher to 7.9 percent, news unlikely to alter the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy or instill confidence that the recovery is gaining steam.

Economists were looking for 160,000 net new jobs created with the unemployment rate holding steady at 7.8 percent.

The ho-hum jobs numbers for January were accompanied by substantial revisions higher for previous months, according to the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics . . .

A report earlier this week indicated that third-quarter growth actually contracted 0.1 percent, but Friday’s jobs numbers contradicted the gross domestic product read.

Read full story HERE.

The Reality of Long Term Unemployment

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Photo Credit: mediajorgenycIn his “Mission Accomplished” moment, Barack Hussein Obama ended his jobs council on Thursday, January 31, 2013. Despite the fact that more than 12 million people in the U.S. are still out of work.

Obama’s allies will point out that when the jobs council began two years ago, unemployment was above 9 percent and has since improved to 7.8 percent. What they conveniently overlook is that the unemployment number has shifted downwards in large part due to people who have exceeded their unemployment benefits are no longer being counted.

So, if you are a middle aged worker who has experienced long term unemployment, you have forever lost what for most people were the peak earning years of life. A time when under normal circumstances, the opportunity to save for retirement was most feasible financially.

Instead you were drawing unemployment benefits worth less than half what you used to make. As the result, instead of saving for retirement, you reduced your expenditures (read: standard of living) by half. Not to mention the loss of medical, vacation, 401k and other employer provided benefits. Then to add insult to injury, the self-imagined, self-appointed “progressive” intellectual elite ruling class decide that the expiration of the unemployment benefits that sustained your Spartan existence means that for the purposes of their statistics, you are no longer out of work.

Even if you have honestly sought work for years and have been unsuccessful thanks to an economy crippled by their “progressive” economic policies, have used up all your personal savings and are a month or two away from living on the street.
The reality of long term unemployment is not being accurately portrayed by the Obama administration, their “progressive” political allies, or their devoted supporters within the institutionalized “progressive” left.
The economy is not growing. Jobs are not being created. If you are unemployed, prospects for future employment look bleak.
Their big government “stimulus” spending was devoted primarily to helping their “progressive” allies in blue states that needed the money to balance their own indebted balance sheets.

Every dollar spent on “stimulus” was obtained through a tax on the private sector. Instead of the private sector having the money they earned to invest in growing business and creating jobs, it was sent to Washington DC, where the cost of an ever growing, bloated bureaucracy was first removed, then redistributed to those deemed fit by the same self-imagined, self-appointed “progressive” intellectual elite ruling class that has shown through their handling of the nation’s unemployment statistics that they are far more concerned with retaining their own grip on power than truly helping the little guy.

If you have a job, thank God and pray to keep it.

Read more on this story HERE.

Mission Accomplished: Obama’s Jobs Council Shut Down

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Photo Credit: WarmSleepyPresident Barack Obama will let his jobs council expire this week without renewing its charter, winding down one source of input from the business community even as unemployment remains stubbornly high.

When Obama in January 2011 formed his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, unemployment was hovering above 9 percent. Two years president later, more than 12 million people in the U.S. are out of work. The unemployment rate has improved to 7.8 percent, but both parties agree that’s still too high.

A provision in Obama’s executive order establishing the council says it sunsets on Thursday. A White House official said the president does not plan to extend it.

Officials said the president always intended for the council to fulfill its mission and then wind down, and said that Obama would continue to actively engage and seek input from business leaders about ways to accelerate job-creation and economic growth. Among the steps Obama plans to pursue are expedited permits for infrastructure projects, the White House said.

Even before it was clear whether Obama would renew the jobs council, Republicans seized on its likely expiration as evidence the president has devoted insufficient attention to creating jobs, which polling shows remains a top priority for Americans. The Republican National Committee dubbed it part of “the failed Obama record,” while the House Republicans’ campaign committee, in an online petition, accused Obama of laying off his own jobs council.

Read more on this story HERE.

Study: Two-Thirds of New Jobs Created Under Obama Presidency Go To Immigrants

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Photo credit: Russ EvansTwo-thirds of those who have found employment under President Obama are immigrants, both legal and illegal, according to an analysis that suggests immigration has soaked up a large portion of what little job growth there has been over the past three years.

The Center for Immigration Studies is releasing the study Thursday morning, a day ahead of the final Labor Department unemployment report of the campaign season, which is expected to show a sluggish job market more than three years into the economic recovery.

That slow market, combined with the immigration numbers, could explain why Mr. Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney have struggled to find a winning jobs message in some of the country’s hardest-hit postindustrial regions.

“It’s extraordinary that most of the employment growth in the last four years has gone to the foreign-born, but what’s even more extraordinary is the issue has not even come up during a presidential election that is so focused on jobs,” said Steven A. Camarota, the center’s research director, who wrote the report along with demographer Karen Zeigler.

His numbers are stark: Since the first quarter of 2009, the number of immigrants of working age (16 to 65) who are employed has risen 2 million, from 21.2 million to 23.2 million. During the same time, native-born employment has risen just 1 million, to reach 119.9 million.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sen. Patty Murray: Democrats will go over ‘fiscal cliff’ unless GOP relents

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With the US economy speeding toward a year-end fiscal cliff of some $560 billion in higher taxes and draconian spending cuts, Sen. Patty Murray (D) of Washington bluntly laid out her party’s position on how Congress should handle the nation’s coming fiscal travails: Go big or go over the ledge.

“Millions of jobs could be lost through the automatic cuts, programs families depend on would be slashed irresponsibly across the board, and middle-class tax cuts would expire. And once again, if Republicans won’t work with us on a balanced approach, we are not going to get a deal,” said Senator Murray, the Senate’s No. 4 Democrat, in a speech at the Brookings Institution on Monday.

“[I]f we can’t get a good deal – a balanced deal that calls on the wealthy to pay their fair share – then I will absolutely continue this debate into 2013, rather than lock in a long-term deal this year that throws middle-class families under the bus,” she said.

The chair of the party committee charged with electing Democrats to the Senate laid out the broadest, most full-throated explanation of the party’s views on the party’s negotiating position vis-a-vis the fiscal cliff, while outlining the party’s strategy for attacking Republicans at the polls in November.

While optimistic “that we can get a good deal,” Murray said Democrats would not, for example, sign on to a plan that would offset the $55 billion portion of the $109 billion in automatic spending cuts mandated by the “sequester,” the budget-slashing mechanism agreed to as part of 2011’s debt-ceiling showdown. The remainder of the reductions come from discretionary spending, home to Democratic priorities like social welfare programs, and reductions in payments to Medicare providers.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: ozmafan