Today's awful employment report
This headline says it all: U.S. unemployment rate 4.7% vs. 4.9% forecast
Well, that sounds great! The labor market is booming, right?
Wrong.
More than 400,000 people fell out of the labor force in May, and thus are no longer counted. That's the only reason the unemployment rate fell.
What happened was that only 38,000 jobs were added in May, the slowest rate in five years.
What's more, even those employed were not in a good way.
The number of people working part-time because their hours were cut or because they couldn't find a full-time job rose by 468,000 to 6.4 million in May, according to the report.
For those of you who think that employment will just bounce back, it's time to face the facts.
This isn't an outlier report. There are solid, indisputable reasons why employment has stalled and won't be coming back anytime soon. I've been yelling about this for months and few have noticed:
Corporate earnings have been falling for more than a year.
Companies are eventually going to stop hiring if the money stops coming in. It's Econ 101.
Plus sales have topped out and are dropping while credit has started tightening because corporate defaults are rising.
It's not hard to see a trend starting.
Comments
When people...
are unemployed, corporate earnings will fall since no one is spending...it will feed into itself. And the Democrats will not try to inject capital into the system to stimulate the economy...
Obama did a stimulus package waaaaay back at the
beginning of his presidency. Sen Susan Collins would only vote for the bill if she was allowed to play with the numbers a bit. She changed 40% of spending into tax cuts. So, an inadequate stimulus, coupled with a Congress pushing austerity, and it's amazing the employment situation isn't worse than it is.
I wish Bernie would do a better job of explaining his plan for a stimulus. He talks about 13 million jobs, but doesn't explain that only a part of the new jobs would be in construction. The rest will be in all areas, to accommodate all that new money being injected into the economy.
Only the government has the ability to inject sufficient money into the economy to do a serious jump start. And only a leader who cares about the poverty and suicides that pervade our country will take the necessary steps. A person like Hillary Clinton, who thought welfare reform was a good idea, is absolutely not the leader we need.
I would have...
told Susan Collins to fuck herself. Obama didn't need Republican support to pass a stimulus bill. He had 58 Democrats, Bernie Sanders, and Angus King. Of course there were conservative "Democrats" who would have opposed some of his ideas, but his insistence on "bipartisanship" early on killed much of his agenda.
King was elected in 2012
Democrats, we tried to warn you. How is that guilt and shame working out?
Thanks for the correction...
he still had a huge majority in which he could force a bill through...
And Al Franken hadn't yet been seated...
...due to the recount (he was sworn in July 7, 2009), so technically "our team" only had 59 Senators. However, when you consider the Blue Dogs, actual Democratic Party support for the stimulus was only around 50 Senators. Of course, by refusing to shit-can the filibuster Harry Reid guaranteed another two years of Kabuki theater while the malefactors of great wealth, aided and abetted by BOTH Parties and President Obama, continued to rob us blind...
I want my two dollars!
The stimulus was passed very early in his administration.
At that time, there were 58 Dems in the Senate (and that's counting Bernie). Obama's hope was to lure Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter (this was before Specter changed parties). Additionally, Ted Kennedy was dying (his last vote was in March, 2009) and Robert Byrd, being very old, was only brought to the Capitol to vote.
Obama might have put up a stronger fight to keep the numbers as originally proposed, but he didn't. He, and a lot of others, were just happy to get any kind of a stimulus. It would have been enough if: 1) it had been reviewed and renewed sometime down the road, or 2) there hadn't been such a push for austerity coming from the Repukes. We lost a lot with the threat of blowing up the world economy.
I know there are a lot of people who believe Obama didn't fight as hard as he could. I spent a lot of time watching the Senate in action, while reading and listening to Thom Hartmann to fill in things I didn't follow. I really don't know if he had pushed harder if he would have been any more successful in getting a better package. I know there were several people in his administration who resigned as a result of the eventual deal. Now that we know that several Repukes met the evening of the inauguration and vowed to not allow Obama any successes, it's hard to know what he coulda, shoulda done.
Bully pulpit?
How hard did Obama pound the message home from the bully pulpit? I'm old and my memory ain't what it used to be, but I don't remember him pushing very hard for the stimulus. No "folks, this is what got us out of the Great Depression. We freakin' need it" that I can recall.
President Obama signed the stimulus bill on
Feb 17, 2009. He may not have known where the bully pulpit was stored at that time. He may not have known where the bathroom was at that time. Like I mentioned, several people resigned after its passage, meaning that there wasn't full agreement re: amounts and distribution. I can understand not cutting him slack now, but that was pretty early in his term to expect perfection. I doubt he realized that was going to be his only shot at any kind of stimulus.
It would have been a negative print
In the perverse world of finance ...
this will hold the Fed's hand, ensuring that the gravy train keeps rolling along (people have already revised estimates for a rate hike from July to December!) The actual economy is terrible while the stock market flirts with all-time highs.
Not to mention wages
The article has an interactive map and a searchable data base for statistics by state and metro area.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
Every time I see data like this,
I have just one thought. FUCK YOU BILL CLINTON MI and the employment and wage numbers are directly tied to NAFTA.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
NAFTA
Carrier told 2100 workers to get bent in February because the company is moving those jobs to Mexico.
55,000 factories have closed thanks to NAFTA, CAFTA, etc; and letting China into the WTO. The human toll is appalling and Obama is making it worse. What will happen if TPP and the Euro version pass?
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
I almost missed this
revisions
Thom Hartmann wrote a book called (something like)
The Crash of 2016. A soothsayer??
Any idea what caused that 4 or 5 month uptick in
labor force participation, prior to this latest drop?
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Just a counter-cycle movement
Nothing moves in only one direction.
True enough, but it looks like it was significant and extended,
not just a random blip. I was just wondering whether there was some sort of unusual event or program or policy change that briefly brought participation up, the way the census did in 2010.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
The Labor Dept has put 90% of the last few year's new jobs
into its "low wage" and "very low wage" catagories.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
Could be Ag jobs?
Those pesky Mexicans? Fresh produce in stores...
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
There has been no recovery.
I keep saying this. These bullshit unemployment numbers mean nothing. It's the participation rate you've got to watch, and the labor share of GDP. Is China in trouble ? Hell yes, because the US consumer, the consumer of last resort, hasn't got any money to spend. We can't even afford their cheap plastic crap anymore. Corporate profits down ? Gee, I wonder why. No jobs, low wages and debt deflation. Don't let them tell you we're in a recovery, look around. It's aggregate demand, there ain't none.
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.
More adults living with their parents than at any time in
post-agricultural america's past.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
And Democrats pretend there is not a jobs issue.
Obama has a legacy to stake a claim to, and it's not the legacy he'd like to leave behind, but it's the one he's stuck with. He could have made other choices but he compromised his principles and in so doing, he compromised the American people.
Obama showed us all what Hope and Change actually means to the wealthy and political classes. Those trying to get elected in 2016 will ignore the problem with jobs because if they admit there is a jobs issue, then they undermine the legacy tour, and they call into question eight years and the non recovery for most Americans.
The only 'recovery' that was any good was for the wealthy, as it should be because that's who the politicians represent and support. Every one else can just swallow the lies that things are great because they/we have no representation.
I posted this on TOP
and I was assured that jobs will come "roaring back" soon and there was "nothing to worry about".
So there you have it. A non-event. Feel better now?
The Derpity Derp 'experts over there have been saying that
for years.
More than a few morons over there even made claim that the Labor Participation Rate means nothing. They even included a chart with numbers and lines and referenced other moronic posts to prove how right they were even though they are and were wrong.
Nothing they can say over there would make me feel better.
Sorry, but you're getting it all wrong.
We don't need jobs - literally. Wage slavery is obsolete. What we need is a way to support people without requiring them to waste a third of their day "working". We need to work less, not more, consume less, not more, pollute less, period.
The future is a 20 hour week and 25% unemployment - hell, ultimately 70%, once McDonald's becomes an automat. We can make that an almost utopia or we can make that a third world hell - it just depends on who we allow to decide which.
Our problem is not inadequate income, it is the cost of unavoidable expenses - housing is too expensive, health costs (mostly insurance premiums, but the ACA is changing that, just look at drug prices) and believe it or not taxes - regressive taxes, and the percentage of government budgets that's wasted - the federal government spends what? $640 billion a year on "defense"? $25 billion in oil company subsidies? Tax subsidies to Coke and McDonald's for overseas expansion? I'm not a teabagger, but if they knew what they were talking about they would be right.
On to Biden since 1973
I half-agree.
The reality, as I've tried to explain when people start to blather about "Job Creators", is that there is actually no shortage of useful work to be done. The problem is that our economic system is not arranged so as to facilitate that people are engaged in the most-useful work, even to the extent that a lot of that work goes undone at the same time that other people go without employment.
And even if we reached a point where we could look around and say, "Y'know, we really don't have 40 hours/week worth of useful work to be done by every able-minded/bodied citizen," we could as a society choose between the alternatives of spending less time at work, or working less fiercely and desperately when we are at work.
I suppose I favor both. But right now, today, I suggest that we could put 30 or 40 million of our citizens to work just cleaning up the gigantic mess we've made out of our environment, and keep them busy for a good long time.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Well there at least will be a transition.
There is a huge amount of cleanup and deferred maintenance that will have to be done, and agreed, the only reason we aren't doing it now is our dystopia.
But that won't last. For example, I take a retired teacher shopping once a week. Her 2001 Saturn has 45k on the odometer. It's on it's second alternator, it's third set of tires, and the original spark plugs. We need to rebuild essentially every bridge in the country, but once that's done it's done for fifty years. The average car lasts 11 years now and 2000 people can - and do - build 2 million cars a year; what about when people stop having to commute 70,000 miles a year and their cars last 20 years?
Fifty years ago Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book called Player Piano. He was right. The problem will be finding something for people to do, once we clean up our act and start saving $12,000 a year on housing and $5000 a year on health care, and $500 a year on gas and… and… and...
On to Biden since 1973
player piano is an awesome book.
closer to 60 years ago i think, it was one of kv's first, if not THE first, published novels.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
The bill has come due.
The wealthy can only suck so much wealth out of the economy before the fount runs dry. Even a global economy does not allow infinite wealth extraction.
I raise my hand
as one of the unemployed, have been for 9 years. Those of us below employed or underemployed (retirees back with aprons on somewhere) see the bleak future. My two adult children are both employed. I hold my breath.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.