Perhaps you’ve heard it on the news; notwithstanding dismal numbers in manufacturing and many other industries, and a rise in jobless claims, unemployment “dropped” last month.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Each percentage point in the “unemployment” figures represent about three million workers, give or take (2.5, 2.7, whatever; lots of workers).  Thus, a gain or loss of a full point in unemployment means somewhere between 2.5-3 million jobs, one way or the other.

A tent of a point, thus, means around 250-300 thousand jobs.

Now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that 114,000 new jobs were created last month which, all other things being equal and fudging up a bit means about a .04%.

The BLS also says that the workforce participation rate rose by .1%, to 63.6% of the labor force, up just a hair from a 30-year low.  That means a net of roughly 250-300 thousand people returned to a work force…

…that didn’t even add enough jobs to account for the monthly growth in the population (we need to add 200,000 jobs a month just to break even).

My radio colleague Ed Morrissey notes:

The number of unemployed dropped 456,000 last month, while only 114,000 jobs got added. That either means that 342,000 people left the US, or they left the work force in one way or another. In the household survey, though, the number of people with jobs rose by 873,000 — a very strange outcome that makes it appear that more than one tweak has been done to previous data. (The +873K is in the seasonally adjusted number, by the way.)

Beyond that?  As Ed also points out, the U6 unemployment rate – which includes the marignally-employed and part-time workers along with the traditional “unemployed” – has been holding rock-steady at 14.7% – roughly where it’s been all year long.

So to sum it up:

• The economy didn’t add enough jobs to keep up with populations growth
• 300,000 people came back to the job market on top of the population growth
• the percentage of the marginally-employed and unemployed stayed exactly even…

…but unemployment dropped by 800,000?

Does that mean 400,000 people got 20-hour-a-week jobs at McDonald’s or what?

I’m going to guess “or what”.

Where “Or what” means “the BLS is practicing Chicago Math the month before an election”.

UPDATE:  Charlie Martin at PJM breaks it down.  The economy added a slew of part-time jobs, enough to keep ahead of the 450,000 jobs lost.  What that may show us, as Charlie says, is that it’s getting to be too expensive to hire employees full-time.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

I like this analogy, from Instapundit

***

Don’t think that zero is as low as interest rates can go: money as a store of value is also threatened.

Primitive man often faced an interest rate of -%50 per hour, if he caught some meat for instance, and was trying to get it into the bellies of his family it spoiled or was snatched by competitors. Now you can store your income and wealth in financial instruments and only buy meat when you want to eat it, or keep it in the fridge or freezer for even greater convenience. We take all this for granted, but as near-zero nominal interest rates come to be paired with rising inflation–an outcome that is pretty much guaranteed under QE3–even coin and currency will no longer keep stored value from wasting away. We are heading into difficulties that should be a thing of the past, and its not just bedbugs and resistant disease. Government is squandering EVERYTHING.

***

So we need to invest in stuff that won’t spoil, that people will be willing to trade for after the economy collapses. Honestly, gold bullion doesn’t strike me as useful for everyday living. More useful, durable stuff would be:

Whiskey

Bullets

Toilet paper

I’m pretty much good to go.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Americans at large – other than Mormons – have never really taken the possibility of complete collapse seriously.

It’s looking smarter and smarter.

I bet I just got onto a DHS watchlist, didn’t I?

You see it in Presidential statements, in Bill Clinton’s pro-Obama ad, and all over the place:

“Deregulation and tax cuts are what got us into this mess in the first place”.

It’s a Big Lie, and they’re repeating it over and over and over, in hopes that they can lop off not only the low-information voters, but maybe a few “moderates” and “Independents” who don’t pay much attention beyond the sound bites.

The melt-down in the financial industry was caused by the socialization of risk and privatization of reward – by the government.

The melt-down had nothing to do with tax cuts.  Democrats say that the deficit was exacerbated by the Bush tax cuts – which is true, if you believe that spending is inviolate and must be paid for rather than cut.

“But non-discretionary spending is, well, non-discretionary”.  Only if you don’t have the guts to change the laws.

Long story short:  the Democrats are lying to you, in hopes that enough of you are uninformed or incurious enough to buy their BS.

There’s really no more artful way to put it.  And I’m getting tired of trying to be artful about it.

Not a freaking chance in the world.

Three years and seven months into the Obama administration, there’s no longer any reasonable doubt that we’re living through the worst presidential exercise of economic stewardship since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s rabid progressivism known as the New Deal locked the Federal Reserve-created, Herbert Hoover-enhanced Great Depression into place for eight additional years. In 1932, the year before FDR was inaugurated, the unemployment rate was 23.6%. In 1940, it was still 14.6%. In between, it never fell below 12%. The economy only recovered because of the military build-up required to win World War II.

I heard Kruger on NPR on Friday – spouting his “Recovery” claims without any pushback from the hosts.

The media is doing its best to floss the narrative to a fine sheen.

Today, as Mort Zuckerman accurately contended in a Friday evening Wall Street Journal op-ed, “we are experiencing, in effect, a modern-day depression,” where “dependent millions” relying on food stamps and swelling the disability rolls “are the invisible counterparts of the soup kitchens and bread lines of the 1930s.” Zuckerman, James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute, and Amy Payne at the Heritage Foundation have accumulated separate litanies of awful statistics, largely focusing on deep drops in labor force participation and sharp increases in discouragement. Collectively, they completely repudiate Krueger’s and Solis’s aforementioned recovery assertions.

Read the whole thing.

And make sure your less-informed friends, relatives and neighbors read it too.

,,.there are not “4.5 million new jobs”.  Or rather, while there may have been 4.5 million jobs created in the past four years, it’s been a piker compared to the jobs lost, downgraded, and sent overseas.

We are not better off than we were four years ago.

But keep on chanting, Dems.  There are only so many dumb voters.

Last March, I sat in the studio at AM1280 and announced, along with Ed, that we were celebrating our eight anniversary on the air.

As I was making the announcement, a round-faced man in a green jacked barged into the studio.  “I was part of that!”

I turned off the mike and had Tommy throw to a commercial.  “Who are you?”

“I’m Fred Pankey.  I’m the manager at the Rainbow Foods on University that you’ve been shopping at for most of the past 20 odd years”.

He stood there.

“And…”

“And this anniversary is partly ours, too.”

“How do you figure”, I asked.

“You ate in the last eight years, right?”

“Right”

“And you bought your food at Rainbow?”

“A lot of it, yes…”

“So the Northern Alliance owes part of its credit to us at Rainbow. Without groceries, there’d be no radio show.

“In other words, what you’re saying is…”
“You didn’t do this”.

“Ah”

To be fair, it was no dumber a display than Nick Kristoff’s bit on the NYTimes the other day.

I’m not going to quote from it – go ahead and read it if you want – but it’s the standard lefty strawman on the subject; “Look!  We found a businesswoman who says “Yes, I did build it!”, but who actually got a government loan!  She is TEH HEPPOCREET!”

Like government wants a cookie for doing stuff we – including all of us who aren’t entrepreneurs – already paid it to do including all of the things we’d rather not have paid for it to do!

And as if the businesswoman whom Kristoff mocks wouldn’t have been an entrepreneur, wouldn’t have found a way, without the government programs she promoted to other businesspeople.

It’s like the lefty nutslap who tried to call me “teh heppocrete” for riding the Ventura Trolley, a light rail line I opposed (and oppose).  I paid for, then and now, at tax time and at the fare box.  Or for riding on a bike path that I thought was a needless budgetary frippery at a time when the city and county it ran through were whinging about their budgets.

It’s my property.  By your leave, I’ll ride ’em both, and exercise my First Amendment.

By the way? You didn’t make that.

Joe writes:

“Aside from a few thousand years in China, Byzantium, Roman Empire, Spanish Empire, British Empire, German Empire and the first century of the United States, when has the Gold Standard ever created prosperity and stability for anyone?”

 

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Remember ten and fifteen years ago?  When people were wondering if Microsoft would eventually control the entire online world?

Back when the left was pondering siccing the government’s anti-trust machinery onto them (even more than they did)?  And the conservative among us urged caution, because the market would inexorably level the field if it were allowed to?

We, as usual, seem to have been proven right again.

It may be the only consistent line of substantive defense of his record that Barack Obama has come up with in almost four years; “it’s Bush’s fault!”.

And according to a Fed economist, it may not be true.

The latest BLS statistics are out.  The media are portraying this as a mild win for the Administration.

It’s not

The unemployment rate ticked up to 8.3% – which is about .3% higher than the peak “The One” promised before unleashing Porkulus.

But worse than that?  The Labor Force Participation Rate, which this past April was the lowest it’d been in thirty years (68.6%) before ticking up in May and June, dropped another tenth to 68.7%.  That’s a good chunk of the reason the unemployment rate held as steady as it did – people left the workforce.

What that means, if you remove the unemployment rate from the participation rate, is that 58.41% of the workforce is working.  That is…:

• 2.16% (3.6 million people) worse than when Obama took office in January of 2009.
• Two and a half points – 3.7 million or so – lower than George W. Bush’s worst record, and 5.3% lower than Bush’s peak (that’s over seven million jobs)
• Almost a tenth of a power lower than when unemployment “peaked” at 10%, in October of 2009
• 4.2% – thats 6.3 million jobs – lower than the nadir of the 9/11 Recession.

Put another way?  It’s been three years since more than 59% of the American people were working.

How long can economy sustain itself with less than three out of five people working?

Americans prefer Romney over Obama on the economy by more than 2:1!

That’s after a couple of weeks of Democrat harping on Romney’s bank accounts, tax returns, and his wife’s horse.

Americans would seem to be in a serious mood about economic matters.

But why, oh why, could that be?

…”Obama promised no middle-class tax hike.  Obama promised no middle-class tax hike…”

Unless Congress takes additional action to address the deficit before then, when the New Year’s hangovers wear off, two big things will have happened.

First, the Bush-era tax cuts will expire. That means income taxes for everyone would return to the higher rates that existed under President Bill Clinton. Taxes on dividends and capital gains also would rise from the current maximum of 15 percent. Top individual rates for high income earners could reach 39.6 percent

Second, $109 billion in automatic federal spending cuts will be set in motion, split evenly between defense spending and domestic programs. That’s because last summer’s agreement to lift the debt ceiling required lawmakers to forge an agreement to reduce the budget deficit by $1.2 trillion. As they failed, the automatic budget cuts are set to take effect.

But remember – it’s neeeeeever a spending problem.  No, it’s all you greedy peasants and the spending the government must do on you!:

“People are calling it the fiscal cliff,” Franken said. “It isn’t. It’s a slope.”

Franken said the tax increases would have little immediate effect on most people since their 2013 taxes won’t be due until the following year.

While that’s not the outcome he wants, Franken concedes that a willingness to let taxes go up is part of the Democrats’ negotiating strategy. “This is the only leverage we have, I think, to focus the Republican Party on being serious about this,” he said.

Franken and most Senate Democrats have signed on to President Barack Obama’s proposal to keep the Bush tax rates in place for those making less than $250,000 a year.

To paraphrase that greatest of Democrat thinkers, Rahm Emanuel, “Never waste a wedge issue”.

Some Republicans get it:

“They have a tax policy that says that they’re going to hold the entire economy hostage unless Republicans agree to a tax increase,” said U.S. Rep. John Kline, a Republican. “Is a tax increase on anybody, let them pick the number for how wealthy you have to be, so important that they’re going to send us over the cliff?”

Kline doesn’t want to see taxes go up at all. He’s also worried that the automatic budget cuts could devastate the economy by throwing thousands of defense contractors out of work.

“You’re going to have huge cuts in the private sector, and that’s the piece that I think is most problematic,” Kline said.

But Kline voted for the debt ceiling deal that created the automatic budget cuts, and Democrats say the only way for Republicans to help undo the cuts will be to negotiate a deal with them on taxes.

Of course they do.

WIth a (as yet unrevised) job number of around 80K – a fraction of what’s needed to meeting population growth – the unemployment rate held steady at 8.2% with this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers.

But the actual Labor Force Participation Rate also held steady at 63.8%.

That means the actual percentage of the work force that’s actually working – that 63.8% of people between the ages of 16 and 65 that are working, or trying to work, and haven’t been out of work for longer than a year, and less all of the unemployed – is actually 58.57%.

• That’s two points lower than when Barack Obama took office.
• Thats 7/100 of a percent better than in October of 2009, when unemployment peaked at 10%.
• It’s half a percentage better than when participation bottomed out two months later, in December of 2009.  Which was a very brief downward spike, by the way – with rates in general being right about where they are today.  Equal to the worst rates at the “bottom” of the recession.
• That’s almost five points lower that the best rate under the Bush Administration – and two and a half points lower than the worst rate Bush had (as he left office).  A fairer comparison?  Its 3.5% worse than the bottom of the rate during the post-9/11 recession.

Face facts, America.  There is no recovery.  Obama’s “economic policy” is a joke.

If America votes for four more years of this, it deserves what it gets.

Update:  It’s worse if you’re Hispanic.

Update2:  And worse still if you’re black.

The biggest burden of Obamacare – one of the biggest entitlement programs in US history – will be borne by middle class taxpayers.

The “99%”.  Or rather, the half of the 99% that pay taxes, and maybe then some.

The left will try to divert this, saying that the penalty for not buying insurance is, in and of itself, not the biggest tax increase in history.  And they’re right.

But it’s not the only tax that Obamacare imposes, and imposes squarely on the middle, entrepreneurial and working classes.

Gary Gross notes that Obamacare is a 21 tax salute for Minnesotans:

That includes a job-killing (or at least job-deferring, which if your’e unemployed is the same as a job kill) .9% addition to the payroll tax to pay for Obamacare, as well as a tax on dividends.

All of which, let us not forget, defiers the one thing that actually  can help America get on top of the heath care crisis – job creation and recovery from the Obama recession!

It was four years ago this summer that we first started trying to take stock of the City of St. Paul’s new “vacant building” policy.

Under this policy – passed in the spring of 2008 by the St. Paul City Council, with little fanfare – vacant homes that have been classified as Category II (needs work) or Category III (teardowns) need to be brought up to current building codes to get their certificate of occupancy restored.  Which, with a house built in 1920, is going to be $100,000-200,000 worth of work.  In Saint Paul, that’s on top of a house that probably got foreclosed with a bubbled-up $200,000+ mortgage which, in a distressed neighborhood like the East Side, the North End or Frogtown, is on a property that sits on a block with several other foreclosures, in a neighborhood with many more, and might go for $50,000 today.

So sales prices have plummeted – median home prices in Saint Paul crashed by nearly half from 2007 to 2011.

And as those prices plummet, the odds of getting a refinance dwindle away to nothing, increasing the likelihood of more foreclosures.

You were warned.

It’s starting to have an effect that the local leftymedia is starting to notice, even if they misattribute its caues.  The Daily Planet, a non-profit left-leaning news site, has a report from the East Side:

Active in her church, outdoors often with her home daycare, and prone to taking long walks, Carol Overland is one of those ladies who everybody in the neighborhood knows, or at least recognizes. She’s lived on St. Paul’s East side for 35 years.

In the last three years, she’s noticed something new. “They put up a blue sign or a white sign and it’ll say ‘Notice of Foreclosure,’” she said.

“There’s one house right up here,” she said, pointing. “There’s a house down here. There’s a house on Cottage. There’s two houses going down towards Ivy.”

It’s a piker, of course; one could find blocks around Payne and Maryland where half the houses were vacant, at one point.

A recent report by the interfaith non-profit ISAIAH titled “Lost Homes: How the foreclosure crisis has hit the East Side and North End of St. Paul,” describes the crisis. Members of the organization are pressuring city officials to implement solutions laid out in the report.

We’ll look at the “solutions” in the report tomorrow.

“There’s this silent, selective tornado that’s just touching down and—Bam. Bam. Bam,” said Jonathan Zielske, pastor at Hope Lutheran Church, near Overland’s home. “If it were a real tornado or a real flood, city officials would all rush and try to do something.”

A real tornado or flood is not controllable by humans.

This disaster, on the other hand? It’s got the fingerprints of the Saint Paul City Council, just as surely as those of Bank of America, all over it.

The coalition is pushing hardest for a foreclosure mediation program that would encourage bank representatives and foreclosure candidates to sit down with a third-party mediator and come up with a solution that works for everyone. They argue that mediation could prevent foreclosure for some homeowners and offer a graceful exit for others.

The solution would address charges that banks have pushed homeowners out only to resell homes at prices the original owners could have afforded.

In other words, the banks are “charged” with lending home-owners one amount – say, $200,000 – and then not writing that down to $110,000.

Who’d have thunk it?

More tomorrow.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

I went with my son-in-law looking at used cars this weekend. Have you seen the prices? Shockingly high. With incentives, rebates and interest rates, brand-new costs the same as used.

You do, indeed, pay a lot these days for that “pre-depreciated” option.

The used vehicle market seems to be distorted: there aren’t enough used vehicles so the scarcity has driven up demand and with it, price. It’s as if some giant vacuum cleaner sucked up millions of perfectly good used cars and crushed them to get them off the market. Weird.

My son-in-law can afford a replacement vehicle so I suppose that makes him a 1%-er. I have no idea how single mothers or low income minority families do it. The burden is falling on those least able to afford it. Good thing this isn’t the result of some well-intentioned Bush-era government program or there’d be Hell to pay.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

No kidding.

Because if an Administration were to make “imposing scarcity for a necessity – affordable transportation – on low-income Americans” a “first 100 days” priority, some might think that Administration didn’t have the good of this country’s poorest at heart.

That’d be just weird, woudln’t it?

The economy created fewer than 100,000 jobs this past month – and the numbers for March and April have been revised down, to boot – but in fact May’s labor force participation rate “jumped” from 63.6% to 63.8%.

However, the unemployment rate – the percentage of those 63.8% of the workforce that’s trying to work – crept back up to 8.2%.

Put it all together, and on 58.57% of the workforce is actually working. Which is almost exactly two points lower than it was when Obama took office, and only 7/100 of a percent higher than in October of 2009, when unemployment was 10%.  It’s 6/100 of a percent higher than in December of 2009 – the putative nadir of the recession.

By all means, let’s talk about the President’s freaking birth certificate.

Hollande, looking sauced

France goes on a holiday from financial reality and makes Sarkozy pack.

The future of the European Union (and worldwide markets) may hinge on the following question: Is François Hollande a “fool or a knave”?

Hollande, seeking to become France’s first Socialist President since François Mitterrand, won a narrow victory Sunday over Nicolas Sarkozy – ending the Fifth Republic’s brief and troubled flirtation with mildly conservative economic policies.  Hollande’s election was not only a victory for a Socialist Party in political disrepair but for his former domestic partner and 2007 Socialist nominee (remember, it’s France) Ségolène Royal.  Whether his win proves to be a defeat for the economics of the EU will have to wait to be seen.  As the UK’s Telegraph details, (having asked the above question about Hollande’s political motivations), France faces extraordinary fiscal challenges:

Today, the top corporate tax is 34.4 percent (compared to 15.8 percent in Germany) and France has a €96 billion budget shortfall, which caused it to lose its high credit rating. The absurd 35 hour week largely remains in effect. Here’s the most damning statistic: government spending now accounts of 56 percent of France’s GDP. It’s only higher in five other countries in the world – including Iraq and Cuba.

Keep in mind, these figures were after 5 years of Sarkozy’s supposedly “draconian” policies and political rule by his center-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP).  Hollande, in theory, wants to undo the same policies through increased progressive taxation, including the creation of an additional 45% for income above 150,000 euros and capping tax loopholes at a maximum of €10,000 per year.

In an economic era defined by deficit spending and a general lack of funds, François Hollande seems intent to upend the Franco-German alliance that has sought to force austerity measures on the rest of the EU.  “Germany doesn’t decide for all of Europe,” Hollande intoned during the campaign.  Yet what is the alternative?  A nation drowning in debt can no more spend it’s way solvent than a fat person can eat themselves thin.

Marine Le Pen should be proud.  The leader of the supposed ultra-conservative (more social nationalist) National Front and daughter of the 2002 run-off presidential candidate announced her intention to leave her ballot blank – a signal to the 18% who voted for her to ensure Sarkozy’s defeat.

Sarkozy would hardly be recognized as “conservative” across the Pond.  Three of his ministers were leftists.  He pushed for legislation to fight global warming.  He worked to help Socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn become head of the IMF (when Straus-Kahn wasn’t trying to plow room service).  Far more damning, Sarkozy’s response to the 2008 economic meltdown was vintage Socialist – declaring that “laissez-faire capitalism is over” and decrying “the dictatorship of the market.”  Yet, he raised the retirement age, cut taxes and attempted, unsuccessfully in the end, to ween France off the entitlement teat.

How the markets react may be the most important question in the aftermath of Hollande’s victory.  Coupled with the showing of Alexis Tsipras in Greece – whose policies mirror Hollande in a desire to tax the rich and delay debt repayments – the concern over the fate of he EU will renew Monday morning.  Greece had agreed to impose pension and wage cuts in return for two international rescues worth 240 billion euros.  Either the policy continues or the payments stop.  An end to payments would suggest an economic amputation from the Euro Zone, with Greece either leaving or being forced to abandon the Euro.  A Greek departure could easily start a domino effect in the EU and send worldwide markets into a tailspin.

Hollande may be forced to continue may of the policies he publicly campaigned against.  Short of a desire to commit economic suicide, he has little leverage to do otherwise.

The left and media are crowing – quietly, if one can indeed crow quietly – about the “Drop” in the unemployment number, from 8.2 to 8.1% in April.

They are being a lot more subdued about the much more important number; only 63.6% of the labor force from age 16 to retirement is participating in the labor market.

So when you take 8.1% out of that number, it means only 58.45% of the American work force is actually working right now.

Here are some fun facts about the employment figures:

• The month Barack Obama took office,  60.58% of the people were working.
• In June of 2009, when the recession officially “ended”, the number was was 58.46% – marginally better than last month.
• In October of 2009, when unemployment peaked at 10%?  58.5%.
• George Bush’s numbers went between a low of 61% (as he left office) and a high of around 63.5% in December of ’06.
• Wanna chalk Bush’s numbers up to the mortgage bubble?  Not so fast: there are about 4.5% fewer people employed now than at this time ten years ago, as the economy was recuperating from the Dot Bomb

So many people have left the labor force, it’s literally gone off the top of the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s chart:

Looks like they need a new chart.

So what happens to an economy when less than 3/5 of the labor force is actually working for an extended period?

If there’s one issue where the GOP-led Legislature has dropped the ball this session, it’s in letting the “Right To Work” Amendment (henceforth RTW) proposal languish, apparently to die, in committee.

Rumor coming from the Legislature is that the leadership is afraid that the unions will dump a ton of money into Minnesota to fight legislators who support RTW.   The fact is that the unions are facing a full-court press, with RTW legislation or related campaigns (like the Walker recall) going on in more states than ever before; they’re playing whack-a-mole, and while they have a lot of extorted dues money to spend (just less than half on union members are Republicans; about 8% of unions’ political money goes to GOP candidates), they’re spread thinner than ever before; putting one more piece of legislation out there will spread them thinner.

It’s not like the unions aren’t going to go after swing-y candidates in Minnesota – they already co-own the DFL along with Alita Messinger, and they will conduct a merciless, no-holds-barred, no-boundaries-respected smear campaign of every Republican in this state no matter what’s on the ballot this year.  And in a year or two or three?  The DFL and unions will have re-filled their coffers, and have many, many fewer challenges to deal with, for better or worse.

So if not now, when?  If not here, where?

The fact is, according to sources on Capitol Hill, we are three votes shy of passing this thing, and there are six GOP Senate holdouts. 

Leadership can do something about this. I’m going to urge you to contact the leadership of the House and Senate:

• Rep. Kurt Zellers – Speaker of the House (rep.kurt.zellers@house.mn / 651-296-5502)
• Sen. David Senjem – Senate Majority Leader (sen.david.senjem@senate.mn / 651.296.3903)

Tell them – politely but firmly – that 2/3 of the people in Minnesota, including liberals, including union members, support this legislation.  And so do you.  And you’re a voter.

Later this week, we’ll start talking about the reported holdouts.

Last week’s BLS numbers were worse, naturally, than the media let on.

Unemployment was “down” to 8.2% – after moving at 8.3 for a few months.  But remember, that percentage is against the “Labor Force Participation Rate”.

And that rate stands at 63.8%.

So you lop 8.2% off of that figure, and you get a grand dotal of 58.57% of the workforce actually working.

By way of comparison – in October of 2009, when the official unemployment rate was 10%, the participation rate was an even 65%, and 58.5% of the workforce was working.  The actual employment rate bottomed out at 58.2%, back in December of 2009.  That means that in terms of Americans working, we’re about a third of a percent better than the lowest point in the recession.

When Barack Obama was inaugurated, 60.58% of the workforce was working. That is over two points higher than it was last month.

The administration and media will try to spin these numbers as “recovery, with work to do”.

The truth is, in terms of Americans working, there is no recovery at all.

For nostalgia buffs?  The low point in the Bush Administration was 61% – half a point higher than the best Obama rate.  The high point was 63.5.

Unemployment is way way way back up in February, says Gallup:

Unemployment in the U.S. rose to nine percent in mid-February, up from 8.3 percent a month earlier, according to a new Gallup survey. The polling company said this suggests that it is “premature” to assume the economy will not feature prominently in the 2012 election season.

Cue Democrats sniveling “Republicans are rooting for a bad economy”.

No.  We are rooting for the biggest thing standing in the way of a good economy, our current Administration and Senate, being sent home in disgrace.

Here, basically, it is:

1. Take control of the House and Senate – and, possibly, the White House – this fall.
2. WIth Obamacare in jeopardy, and a decent chance of a new, Tea-Party-allied GOP majority in the house to gridlock Obama or (hopefully) bolster and enforce Romney’s courage as a conservative, business gets off the fence.  Private capital, currently sitting in banks all over the world, starts flowing again.  Businesses can get capital – and they’re willing to hire people rather than bank money against the regulations and expenses of Obamacare.
3. The economy quickly resumes boom mode…
4. …unless, of course, the GOP majority goes native, DC-style, again, the way they did from 1998 to 2006, and starts spending like worthless Democrats like our idiotic Frist majority did.  Hopefully the conservative grassroots will keep their fighting edge…well, forever.  I goess that’s partly my job.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

I know a guy who invested in real estate in the late 90’s and early 00’s, bought his last parcel in 2004 before any of the troubles began. Talked to him last night for a bit. Interesting story.

Like many honest, hardworking people, he’s been moderately successful in his career and had a 800+ credit score, but has been struggling to make payments on the real estate investment properties and can’t refinance or sell because of declining values. He finally admitted defeat last year and filed for bankruptcy, letting all the properties go. He owed no credit card debt, no consumer debt, only mortgages on the real estate; but the big lenders weren’t content to take the property back, they also wanted judgments to garnish his wages and levy his accounts. Bankruptcy was his only out.

He was astonished to learn that after filing for bankruptcy, all his other creditors cut him off, too. Credit cards that were fully paid up to date with a perfect payment history were canceled on the grounds that continuing to accept his payments was too risky. His bank – to whom he owed no money but instead had money in the bank – canceled his ATM card. He can’t even renew his cell phone contract! He didn’t intend to “go Galt” and drop off the grid – he’s been thrown off the grid by mindless computer programs that consider only the Fair Isaac score and not his personal history of prompt payments.

I think Fair Isaac and the three big credit-scoring agencies have been one of the biggest obstacles to the economy in recent years, and it’s only going to get worse, as millions of Americans, with their credit scores hammered by the abrupt deflation of their homes and Fair-Isaac’s absurd algorithm, become tray to the credit industry.

So now he cashes his paychecks and pays cash or buys pre-paid VISA cards at Walgreens. I wonder how many other people are in the same boat?

To what extent is mindlessly computer-controlled credit inhibit the entrepreneurial activity necessary for an economic recovery?

Perhaps lending needs less federal regulation and more one-on-one human contact?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I think if I were President, I just might reform the credit reporting industry.

Maybe using the Air Force.

While the Democrats will yip like a bunch of over caffeinated Jack Russell terriers about the “jobs” “lost” in the inevitable rejection of Governor Dayton’s idiotic Jerbs plan – jobs that would have either existed without the Jerbs plan (because the $3K one-time deduction would merely confirm a big company’s plan to hire someone) or would never have existed were it to pass (for example, virtually any small business hiring), they are downright proud of Obama’s rejection of the Keystone Pipeline, a private-sector initiative that would have created thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of real private-sector jobs, and create an oil supply to prevent inflation that would kill even more jobs.

The Obama administration announced that it would deny a federal permit for the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, which would run 1,700 miles across six US states bringing toxic, highly corrosive tar sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to refineries and ports in Texas.

The president stood up to Big Oil, backed by the voices of hundreds of thousands of activists just like you, who have built the movement to stop this dirty, dangerous oil project.

So there’s your message, American electorate: government-sponsored jobs good; private sector jobs, expendable.

If the GOP doesn’t pound that home in November, they don’t deserve to win.