News

73% of the new jobs created in the last 5 months were government jobs

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From CNS News.

Excerpt:

In June, a total of 142,415,000 people were employed in the U.S, according to the BLS, including 19,938,000 who were employed by federal, state and local governments.

By November, according to data BLS released today, the total number of people employed had climbed to143,262,000, an overall increase of 847,000 in the six months since June.

In the same five-month period since June, the number of people employed by government increased by 621,000 to 20,559,000. These 621,000 new government jobs created in the last five months equal 73.3 percent of the 847,000 new jobs created overall.

How is it possible that the unemployment rate is going down? It’s simple. The government is borrowing over $1 trillion dollars a year from unborn and born children, and they are using that money to reduce the unemployment rate.

That explains part of the drop in unemployment, but there’s more.

Excerpt:

As for that big “drop” in the unemployment rate, all of it was due to the fact that 540,000 Americans are no longer looking for work. They either dropped out, took early disability or retired. Since the start of 2009, 9.7 million Americans have fallen into this category.

All told, more than 24 million Americans who want jobs don’t have them, driving the labor force participation rate to 63.6%, just above August’s 31-year low of 63.5%. This is the worst labor market in a recovery ever.

And it may get worse. The quarterly Wells Fargo/Gallup small-business survey found that 21% plan to cut jobs over the next six months — a surge from 10% last June and a record high.

IBD’s own research shows that small businesses account for nearly 80% of all new job creation in America. A small-business slump means no jobs. It’s that simple.

Business are already being regulated to death by Obamacare, and all this deficit spending means borrowing that has to be paid back with inflation or higher taxes. Why on Earth would anyone try to hire people now? This economy is a wreck.

News

What is the meaning of Advent? Why do Christians celebrate Advent?

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Calendar of Christian Holidays and festivals
Calendar of Christian Holidays and festivals

Advent is:

Advent is the season that begins the liturgical year. It consists of four Sundays starting with the Sunday closest to November 30th. The word advent is derived from the Latin adventus, which means “coming” or “arrival.” In the societies of the Roman empire, the word adventus referred to the arrival of a person of dignity and great power — a king, emperor, or even one of the gods. For Christians, Advent is the time when the church patiently prepares for the coming of the King of Kings, Jesus Christ. On a personal spiritual level, Advent is a time when we should long for a new breaking in of God’s Spirit upon us.

Here is a good post about the story of Advent by Rev. Donald Sensing at Sense of Events blog.

Excerpt:

They were not a wealthy couple. They got by all right in Nazareth because Joseph was a carpenter, a skilled job, but he didn’t make enough money for the finer things of life. Like everyone else in their country, Joseph and Mary relied heavily on their extended families to help them get through the lean times. And when they were doing well, there was always a third cousin or an aunt twice removed who wasn’t, so they helped as much as they could.

To say it was inconvenient to leave Nazareth to travel to Bethlehem would be the greatest of understatements. They had not counted on leaving Nazareth before the child was born. In fact, they didn’t think they would leave Nazareth ever. But a decree had gone out from the Roman emperor that the whole empire would have to pay a special tax. For some reason, the rulers of Judea decided that they may as well take a census while they were at it. Because of the tribal and clannish nature of society, the authorities ordered everyone to go to their ancestral hometowns to be counted and pay the tax.

Protests that some people could not make the trip, such as the aged and infirm, were simply met with rebuff. So Mary, very late in pregnancy, was compelled to schlep down the Jordan River valley on the back of a donkey. The journey by road was about ninety miles, plus having to climb more than 1,300 feet in altitude, so the trip took more than a week. You can’t travel fast leading a donkey on foot carrying a very pregnant woman.

They arrived in Bethlehem on yom rishon, which simply means, “the first day of the week,” the Jews having a specific name for a day of the week only for the Sabbath, the last day of the week. On the Sabbath, they had not traveled because religious law forbade long-distance travel on that day. Besides, they had needed the rest. So on Sunday afternoon, yom rishon, they reached Bethlehem, just one couple among hundreds of families arriving for the census.

Joseph was a lineal descendant of King David, whose hometown had been Bethlehem. Joseph never made too much of his royal ancestry. Certainly, he was not the only descendant of David, and just as certainly, Joseph never thought about claiming the ancient throne. The Jews had lived under foreign domination for hundreds of years, first by the Greeks and then the Romans. The idea of regaining political independence was simply absurd. There was no way successfully to fight the Roman army, as dozens of Mediterranean nations had discovered.

The little town of Bethlehem lacked the infrastructure to cope with a large influx of people needing to stay for several days at a minimum. The early arrivers had gained lodging with relatives, but the small houses filled up fast. There were few inns in the town that had filled well before Joseph and Mary got to town.

Joseph tried to gain lodging at an inn, but the owner was unyielding. He explained that to take them in, he’d have to throw someone else out. He would not have such dishonor on his head, pregnant Mary or no.

“Try the outside of town,” the man said. “There may be a few homes there with space for a kinsman.”

Click here to read the rest. This is a good post to send to people who don’t know what Christmas is about.

Commentary

Young workers pay into entitlements that will be bankrupt when they retire

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Payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare
Payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare

Doug Ross from Director Blue has a public service announcement for young people. Even if they are able to find jobs, they can look forward to paying a large chunk of their income to the government for retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare, that will be bankrupt by the time they are ready to retire.

Excerpt:

Ever seen these numbers on your pay stub? The numbers I’ve highlighted?

That money is being taken from you — or, more properly, it’s being stolen from you — to fund a myth. A mirage.

You’re never going to see a dime of that “Social Security Retirement Insurance” you’re paying for.

You’ll never a see a nickel of that “Medicare Health Care Insurance” either.

That money is being taken from your pay — your livelihood — to fund a system that will be bankrupt in less than a dozen years.

Oh, and it’s not me saying that: Medicare’s own actuary, Richard Foster, is. Social Security is in a similar situation, according to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who serves as the system’s senior trustee.

Suffice it to say that these systems will actually go broke far sooner than anyone’s really admitting because the economy remains poor and appears to be slowing down even further.

My public service message is this: this money is being taken from your pay in exchange for a promise that will be broken in just a few years. You’ll never see that money again. And it is the government — the government, not “the rich”, not the Koch brothers, not the oil companies — that is ripping you off.

It is the government, not corporations, spending untold billions on “green energy” scams like Solyndra. It is the government, not “the rich”, slathering EBT-welfare cards around like confetti. And it is the government, not “the Tea Party”, that is promoting illegal immigration and offering huge financial benefits to those in the country illegally. All with your money.

Medicare is the one that is really in trouble, as Forbes magazine explains:

The Trustees of the Medicare program have released their annual report on the solvency of the program. They calculate that the program is “expected to remain solvent until 2024, the same as last year’s estimate.” But what that headline obfuscates is that Obamacare’s tax increases and spending cuts are counted towards the program’s alleged “deficit-neutrality,” Medicare is to go bankrupt in 2016. And if you listen to Medicare’s own actuary, Richard Foster, the program’s bankruptcy could come even sooner than that.

See, the funny, funny thing about young people is that they are almost complete uninformed about basic economics. They don’t know where jobs come from. They don’t know where the money that the government spends come from. They don’t know how much the government spends. They don’t know about our debt-to-gdp ratio. Their view of economics is all determined by socialist public schools and socialist Hollywood and socialist mainstream media. It’s all emotional for them. They have feelings that the rich are greedy, and must be taxed, and that the government is Santa Claus, helping the poor with money from the rich. It’s the ultimate system of slavery, except the slaves want to be enslaved.