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President Seeking Credit for Tiny Economic Uptick

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Photo Credit: APBy Justin Sink. President Obama will grab credit for an improving economy in a series of speeches this week that the White House hopes will increase his political clout.

The messaging effort is intended to portray Obama as focused on jobs, which voters repeatedly say is the most pressing issue facing Washington, according to the White House.

Democratic allies argue it will allow Obama to go on offense after months in which he has been dragged down by political controversies that have dogged his second term and injured him in the polls.

“We have to keep focused on these issues, even as we all are buffeted about by, you know, the variety of things that confront us … fake scandals or things like that,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday at his daily briefing.

“We have to keep focused on the North Star here, the issues that the American people want us to be focused on,” he added. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APPressure mounts on Obama as he REFUSES to pay his interns (while campaigning to raise the minimum wage)

By Hayley Peterson. As President Obama campaigns to increase the minimum wage, his own interns aren’t getting paid a cent to work a minimum of 45 hours a week.

White House interns are expected to show up to work ‘at least’ Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., according to the administration’s website. Housing and commuting assistance aren’t provided either, so the White House encourages applicants to petition nonprofits for help funding their living expenses.

Just this summer alone, the White House ‘hired’ 147 interns, saving the administration roughly half a million dollars if it had otherwise paid each intern minimum wage for 45 hours of work per week. The internship program, which lasts 11 weeks in the summer, runs year-round.

Unpaid internships are widespread in Washington. It’s estimated that the federal government uses as many as 30,000 uncompensated interns every summer.

But with Obama calling for an increase to the minimum wage – which is set at $7.25 an hour – activist Mikey Franklin says it’s particularly disdainful for the White House to be relying on free labor. Read more from this story HERE.

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Obama approval rating drops for second straight quarter

By Rick Moran. Gallup tracking poll shows the decline in President Obama’s approval numbers over the last 3 quarters.

The Hill:

Obama averaged a 47.9 percent approval rating for his 18th quarter in office, running from April 20 to July 19. That’s down from 49.7 percent in the first quarter of Obama’s second term in office, and down from 51.9 in the 16th quarter, when he was reelected.

The president got a slight boost in the early stages of the 18th quarter after the Boston Marathon bombings, but declined steadily from there and has not topped the 50 percent mark in almost a month.

According to Gallup, Obama’s average for the quarter is typical for second term presidents. The president comes in well below former presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, well above Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and is near in approval to Harry Truman and George W. Bush.

Read more from this story HERE.

Economic Recovery? Not Hardly

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesIn recent months, Americans have heard reports out of Washington and in the media that the economy is looking up—that recovery from the Great Recession is gathering steam. If only it were true. The longest and worst recession since the end of World War II has been marked by the weakest recovery from any U.S. recession in that same period.

The jobless nature of the recovery is particularly unsettling. In June, the government’s Household Survey reported that since the start of the year, the number of people with jobs increased by 753,000—but there are jobs and then there are “jobs.” No fewer than 557,000 of these positions were only part-time. The survey also reported that in June full-time jobs declined by 240,000, while part-time jobs soared by 360,000 and have now reached an all-time high of 28,059,000—three million more part-time positions than when the recession began at the end of 2007.

That’s just for starters. The survey includes part-time workers who want full-time work but can’t get it, as well as those who want to work but have stopped looking. That puts the real unemployment rate for June at 14.3%, up from 13.8% in May.

The 7.6% unemployment figure so common in headlines these days is utterly misleading. An estimated 22 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed; they are virtually invisible and mostly excluded from unemployment calculations that garner headlines.

At this stage of an expansion you would expect the number of part-time jobs to be declining, as companies would be doing more full-time hiring. Not this time. In the long misery of this post-recession period, we have an extraordinary situation: Americans by the millions are in part-time work because there are no other employment opportunities as businesses increase their reliance on independent contractors and part-time, temporary and seasonal employees.

Read more from this story HERE.

California vs. New York as Nation’s Worst State

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Photo Credit: Kyle Platts

Whenever a free-market research or business group releases a “best and worst” list of states, my eye goes straight to the bottom: To see whether California is last or was edged out for the lowest rank by one of the other mismanaged liberal bastions. Illinois seems to exist to boost the self-esteem of Californians.

I can raise a glass of zinfandel to California’s great victory in the Mercatus Center’s recent “Freedom in the 50 States” study. The state didn’t place last. That distinction went to New York, thanks to its highest-in-the-nation tax rates and entrepreneur-crushing economic regulations. I owe an apology to residents of the Land of Lincoln.

For all the study’s detail about tax rates and regulation, this information jumps out as the most telling about New York: “9.0 percent of the state’s 2000 population, on net, left the state for another state between 2000 and 2011, the highest such figure in the nation.” Moving is the surest sign of dissatisfaction, especially when people relocate from a state that has long been an economic and cultural magnet.

Californians talk incessantly about high-tailing it to Texas or Nevada, yet New Yorkers flee at about double our rate. Migration numbers aside, I would still rank the Golden State as the Most Hopeless State. There are other studies that bolster that case, including Chief Executive magazine’s “2013 Best and Worst States for Business” that places California dead last, with New York in 49th place.

The magazine ranks states based on three categories: taxation and regulation, workforce quality, and living environment. Even with its natural advantages in the last category and high ranking in the second one, California still flopped because its officials have adopted a punitive environment in the first category. That takes some doing.

Read more from this story HERE.

Poll: 61% of College-Age Students Want Government to Stay Out of Their Lives

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YAF Poll of College-Age StudentsSince I graduated from college in 2009, the economy has remained stagnant and the job market has remained weak, with no sign of improvement. Just last week, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported that the unemployment rate hit 7.5 percent.

While the mainstream media and our leaders in Washington want you to believe that the economy is getting better, thanks to more spending, higher taxes, and more regulation, six million people have dropped out of the work force since the recession began in 2008. Young Americans, especially, have it bad.

About 45 percent of 18 to 34-year olds are unemployed according to a recent poll by Demos, a public policy firm. I still know of college classmates who have yet to find meaningful jobs or are severely underemployed almost four years after graduation. However, a recent poll on young people’s views of limited government, free markets, and economic liberty suggests some may be waking up to the conclusion that government, over-regulation, and more spending will not turn our futures around.

In a survey launched by Young America’s Foundation and conducted by the polling company, Kellyanne Conway, Inc., more than 60 percent of college-age students feel that government should not take an active role in their day-to-day-lives, and half of respondents believe that the federal government is mostly hurting economic recovery.

President Ronald Reagan said, “Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.” And, as the poll suggests, young people share this belief: 66 percent of the students polled had a positive opinion of “entrepreneurship,” 44 percent found “free markets” positive, and 42 percent believe the federal government is an opponent rather than a partner in the pursuit of the American Dream.

Read more from this story HERE.

China May Not Overtake America this Century After All

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Photo Credit: GettyThe world’s tallest tower should have been built by now. Officials said last year that the great edifice with 220 floors would be erected in three months flat in China’s inland city of Changsha by March, snatching the crown from Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.

The deadline has come and gone, yet the wasteland sits untouched. It now looks as if the fin d’époque project – using prefab blocs – may never be approved. Even China knows its limits.

Prime minister Li Keqiang has asked the State Council to clamp down on the excesses of the regions. Not before time. A top regulator says local government finances are “out of control”.

Mr Li aims to cut China’s economic growth to a safe speed limit of 7pc next year and rein in rampant investment – still a world record 49pc of GDP – before it traps the country in a boom-bust dynamic of frightening scale.

Vested interests are conspiring to stop him, launching a counter-attack from their power-base in the $6 trillion state industries. Even so, uber-growth is surely over.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Killing Off Small Business: Self-Employment at Historic Low

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The percentage of Americans that are working for themselves has never been lower in the history of the United States. Once upon a time, the United States was a paradise for entrepreneurs and small businesses, but now the control freak bureaucrats that dominate our society have created a system that absolutely eviscerates them. This is very unfortunate, because by murdering small business, the bureaucrats are destroying the primary engine of job growth in this country. One of the big reasons why there are not enough jobs in America today is because small business creation is way down. As I mentioned yesterday, entrepreneurs and small businesses are being absolutely devastated by rules, regulations, red tape and by oppressive levels of taxation. If anyone doubts that small business in the United States is dying, just look at the charts below. Sadly, this is what the bureaucrats that run things want. They don’t want us to be independent of the system. Instead, they are much more comfortable when as many of us as possible are heavily dependent on the system in one way or another. If all of us have to go running to the government or to one of the big corporations for a job, then we are much easier to control. But as the control freaks continue to construct their bureaucratic utopia, they are also killing off what once made the U.S. economy so great.

The other day I came across the following two charts in an article by Charles Hugh Smith, and I was absolutely stunned by what I saw. This first chart shows that the number of unincorporated self-employed Americans has dropped back to levels that we have not seen since the mid-1980s even though our population has increased by tens of millions of people since that time…

At this point, only about 7 percent of non-farm workers are self-employed. That is depressingly low. That means that an overwhelming majority of those that are employed in America are working for the system in one capacity or another.

But isn’t that what we pound into the heads of our children these days? We teach them to work hard in school so that they can “get a good job” when they grow up. From a very early age we train our children to plug themselves into the system.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Lies Go Deeper Than You Ever Imagined

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If you read the newspapers and listen to the perpetual happy talk out of D.C., you might become convinced that the economy is improving. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is supposed to tell us the unemployment rate; and currently, it says the rate is 7.6%. But in reality, we’re being misled.

It’s understandable… we all want to believe the best. And most likely, you feel a little better off than you did four years ago. You can probably look around your neighborhood and see some people doing just fine. But the sinister truth is that we’re being lied to. The government is sponsoring a campaign of misinformation, and we’re all the victims of a mass hypnosis. It leads us to think – falsely – that all’s well in the U.S. of A.

A Stark Contrast

I just spent four days on the beautiful Island of Coronado. I was at a board meeting at a 125-year-old resort, the Hotel Del Coronado. All seemed like a fairy tale. I drove into the city of San Diego and had dinner at a lovely Zagat-rated restaurant. I met a group of friends in a skybox, complete with a buffet line, to watch the Padres beat up on one of their rivals. But that’s where the fairy tale ends.

I also took the time to visit the community of El Centro, California. It’s down Interstate 8 from San Diego. In that town, headline unemployment is nearly 23%. Coming upon a church, I saw a line, winding around the block, of people simply wanting a hot meal.

This is the part of America the media is hiding. They don’t want to blemish President Obama. He feels people’s pain, so he can’t be responsible… right? But the reality is that every Coronado, America has at least one El Centro.

If you dig deeper and calculate unemployment, adding those people standing in the food line who are unemployed, discouraged, and dropping out of the job search, the unemployment rate is 14.3%.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Ignores Disastrous Economic News, Continues His Grand 1% Lifestyle

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Photo Credit: AP

President Obama had another tough week in a second term filled with bad news and blunders — and he’s only 10 weeks in.

While the White House suddenly decided to drop its budget Friday in an effort to control the news, there was no covering up the disastrous jobless numbers: 90 million Americans out of the workforce, the highest level since 1979; another 663,000 joining the ranks of the long-term unemployed; a measly 88,000 jobs “created.”

But what seems stuck in the craw of a lot of you readers out there was last week’s column on the Obamas’ 1 percent lifestyle — the endless ski and beach vacations for the couple and their daughters, Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s nights in London and Paris that cost you more than $1 million, even the president’s 118th round of golf while in office.

“My kids asked me a couple of years ago why we never went on family vacations,” wrote Steve Gibson. “I told them that we had to pay all of our expenses first and there wasn’t any money left over for a family vacation. Then I keep seeing … stories about the administration taking trips everywhere and I don’t know what to think. I have been laid off twice in the past year and am currently in the job search mode again.”

Eric Zundell is in the same boat: “As someone who has not been able to afford a vacation for my family in the last 12 years, (but pays his taxes;) ), I highly applaud the message delivered by your article.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Global Economy: Shaping Up For Another Dismal Year

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Photo Credit: Peter Mintz

Just three months in, and already there is a nagging sense that 2013, like last year and the one before, will produce another disappointing vintage for the world economy.

Japan’s $1.4 trillion monetary barrage stole the show last week, but it was the dismal turn in data from the United States and Europe that brought home how this year is panning out worse than many had hoped.

News that American employers hired far fewer staff in March than even the gloomiest predictions managed to derail the heady rise of stock markets over the last few months.

And business surveys from the euro zone confirmed recession there is dragging on, confounding hopes for improvement, with France’s economy deteriorating sharply.

Hopes now rest with China and that signs of renewed vitality in the world’s second-biggest economy can underpin the global economy. “I’m hopeful we’re not going to see the slide back that we’ve seen over the last couple of years,” said Victoria Clarke, economist at Investec in London.

Read more from this story HERE.

Economy Slips, Percentage of Working Americans Lowest Since 1979

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Photo Credit: Tax Credits

The nation’s economy added 88,000 jobs in March, a figure far below expectations that is likely to trigger new doubts about the strength of the economy.

While the unemployment rate fell to 7.6 percent, that reflected 496,000 workers leaving the workforce, not a strengthening labor market. The 63.3 percent labor participation rate is the lowest since 1979.

Analysts had expected job gains near 200,000 in March. The report released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is likely to renew a debate in Washington about the direction of the economy. Republicans seized on the numbers to criticize President Obama, with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) quoting a former Obama economic adviser to describe the figures as a “punch to the gut.”

“Today’s jobs report is disappointing,” Cantor said in a statement. “Our economy is not creating enough jobs, and too many working men and women are still in the unemployment line.

“For months, we’ve heard plenty of excuses from the White House and Congressional Democrats for why unemployment remains high. It’s time to stop making excuses and start working together on common sense solutions to address our lingering unemployment problem, and the stagnant economy,” Cantor said.

Read more from this story HERE.