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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.

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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.

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Unemployment Rate Falls; Number of Unemployed Stays the Same

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If it looks like there’s something weird in today’s unemployment announcement, that’s because there is. While the U-3 unemployment rate has declined slightly, to 7.7 percent, that doesn’t seem to reflect an increase in the number of Americans who are actually working.

In fact, labor force participation, the more important statistic for American workforce measurements, is down slightly. The unemployment rate looks better because it’s being measured against a smaller denominator. At Eagle Daily Investor, which is owned by the parent company of Human Events, Paul Dykewicz explains why it’s important to look beyond the headline statistic:

” . . . in November, 2.5 million persons were “marginally attached” to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. The data, which are not seasonally adjusted, reflect individuals who the federal agency described as not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. However, those people were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics explained.”

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More Than 300 D.C. Public Employees Busted in Unemployment Fraud Scheme

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The District said Monday that hundreds of city workers took nearly $2 million in fraudulent unemployment benefits, a scandal that roiled the D.C. government earlier this year and prompted widespread firings and criminal charges.

Lisa Mallory, the director of the D.C. Department of Employment Services, told the D.C. Council that her agency had detected $1.9 million in overpayments to District workers who collected unemployment benefits while on the city’s payroll.

“This probe continues to be ongoing,” said Mallory, who has credited access to a specialized database for the initial detection of the fraud.
Mallory’s department has referred 318 cases to the District’s inspector general, some of which have resulted in civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions. Other cases are pending.

“Many of these individuals did lose their employment,” Mallory said. “There are several cases in front of the U.S. attorney, and those will take their course.”

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Huh? Teamsters Called For Secret-Ballot At Hostess While Pushing To Eliminate Secret-Ballots

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For the last several years, union bosses have been fighting to effectively eliminate workers’ right to vote through secret-ballot elections on whether or not to become unionized. Yet, with 6700 members’ jobs about to be wiped out, when push came to shove last week—knowing how unions can manipulate other methods of voting—the Teamsters called for the bakers’ union to hold a secret-ballot vote to let members determine whether or not to continue the strike that would close Hostess.

After buying a Democrat-controlled Congress in 2006, the union-bought House of Representatives passed the delusionally-dubbed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) on March 1, 2007.

EFCA, which gives unions the ability to do away with secret-ballot elections by replacing the secret ballot with so-called ”card-check,” is union bosses’ end game for slowing their 60-year old slide into oblivion.

Over the last seven years, union bosses have spent billions on buying politicians to enact the union-friendly legislation and make workers’ secret-ballots irrelevant.

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Obama Wrong Again: Unemployment Now Even Higher Than What He Predicted Without $800 Billion Stimulus

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Remember those halcyon days early in 2009 when some people believed all things seemed possible with the Messiah to lead the United States?

Remember when the White House, via their economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, sold the $800 billion stimulus by saying that if it were passed, the unemployment rate would be 5.2% in October 2012?

Now those days are gone. The October 2012 unemployment rate was 7.9%, up from 7.8% in September, and the same number as when Barack Obama took office. Romer and Bernstein’s projection even had unemployment under 6% by now — without the stimulus.

23 million people out of work. 8% or higher unemployment for 42 months – 3 ½ years.

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Martha Stewart Sacks Dozens of Employees By Email, Right After Hurricane

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Martha Stewart has got rid of 70 staff from her lifestyle company as she downsizes, it was revealed today.

Workers only began to return to their offices in lower Manhattan on Thursday after flooding from Hurricane Sandy, where they learned of the news. Many reportedly found out they lost their jobs via email.

Living Omnimedia Inc has cut publishing jobs as it increasingly focuses on online video and other digital content.

The lifestyle, media and merchandising company said on Thursday that the move could save it $33 to $35 million per year.

Although the official statement did not reveal how many employees were being eliminated, the New York Times claimed that 70 workers would be let go – 12 per cent of the 600-person company.

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Jobs Report Corrected: Unemployment Claims Explode

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Obama and his defenders championed the supposed reduction in unemployment to 7.8% this week. Romney attacked the number as not reflecting reality. Some suggested that the Department of Labor was playing games with the unemployment numbers.

Well, not exactly. According to Human Events, there was data left out from the jobs report – because it wasn’t received in time – that just about every media outlet ignored:

Nothing was mischievously “suppressed” in the last report. It was a paperwork glitch, not a dirty trick. Information simply was not received on time. It’s happened before. The strange thing about this particular report was how BLS undersold its incomplete nature, and how virtually every major media outlet simply failed to note that a big fat asterisk belong[ed] next to the number. Instead, it was uncritically presented as proof that after all these years, Obamanomics was finally starting to pump out some jobs.

Well, a new week is upon us, all of the data was evidently received on time, and what do you know? Initial jobless claims are up by 46,000, to a seasonally adjusted 388,000. That would technically make it the biggest one-week percentage increase in jobless claims over the last five years. Of course, a great deal of the percentage increase is due to adjustments correcting last week’s inaccurate numbers.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, even with those adjustments factored in, this week’s claims are well above analyst expectations of 365,000 claims. That’s impossible to square with the utterly delusional September jobs report, and its ostensible reduction of the headline unemployment rate to 7.8 percent. A boatload of people got hired in September, but now they’re all filing for unemployment benefits? There is no “Obama recovery.”

Obama Wrong Again: the Private Sector is Suffering; Government Employment Fares Far Better

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President Barack Obama famously blamed the bad economy on a struggling public sector, but a new Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report shows that the issuance of pink slips has slowed among government workers while jumping across much of private industry.

In August, nearly 1.8 million private sector employees were laid off—up nearly 300,000 from July and nearly 100,000 from August 2011. Those layoffs came just two months after Obama proclaimed that “the private sector is doing fine” and attributed struggling job creation to government layoffs.

“The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government,” he said in June. “If Republicans want to be helpful, if they really want to move forward and put people back to work, what they should be thinking about is how do we help state and local governments and how do we help the construction industry?”

The latest BLS numbers tell a different story. Federal employees saw decreased job loss over the year, while layoffs at the state and local level grew by about 2 percent—less than half the 4.4 percent layoff increase experienced by the private sector.

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Recession Wiping Out Black Middle Class

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For months, the presidential candidates have been trying to court the middle class, extending offers of tax cuts, lower gas prices and better schools. The message: America does well when the middle class does well. The corollary: We feel your pain.

But much less attention has been given to the black middle class, which since the recession and slow recovery has suffered massive decreases in wealth and high rates of home foreclosures. Blacks overall are experiencing a 13.4 percent unemployment rate, according to figures released Friday, much higher than the national rate of 7.8 percent.

The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project recently released a report projecting that 68 percent of African-Americans reared in the middle of the wealth ladder will not do as well as the previous generation.

In August, the National Urban League’s State of Black America 2012 report found that nearly all the economic gains that the black middle class made during the last 30 years have been wiped out by the economic downturn.

“This is a very dire situation,” said Valerie Rawlston Wilson, an economist with the National Urban League Policy Institute. “Even for blacks who have college degrees, we’ve seen a doubling of their unemployment (rate) between 2007 and 2010.”

Read more from this story HERE.