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News

Despite record youth unemployment, young people support Obama 52-27

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Labor Force Participation 2012 (click for larger image)
Labor Force Participation 2012 (click for larger image)

From Breitbart.

Excerpt:

Even as unemployment among college graduates remains stuck above the national average at 9.3 percent, a Reuters/Ipsos poll of four-year college graduates finds that President Barack Obama leads his Republican challenger Mitt Romney 52 percent to 27 percent.

The poll’s findings are especially surprising given reports last month that, for the first time in American history, unemployment for college graduates eclipsed that of high school graduates.   As Jed Graham of Investor’s Business Daily reported, “Out of 9 million unemployed in April, 4.7 million had gone to college or graduated and 4.3 million had not, seasonally adjusted Labor Department data show.”

Still, some unemployed college graduates say they are sticking with Mr. Obama in 2012: “I was really excited when Obama won,” said Joe Zmudczynski, a 2011 graduate of Michigan’s Ferris State University who now lives at home with his parents. “He’s still my favorite. It’s not like you can snap your fingers and everything gets better.”

Leftist PBS explains:

Returning to the nest with mom and dad after college and even into the thirties is becoming increasingly more common, but also less stigmatized. Young adults who live with their folks are cheerful, upbeat even, about their choice.

That’s the finding of a new Pew report, released Thursday morning. Three in 10 young adults (aged 25 to 34) say they’ve lived at home recently during the down economy, and 78 percent said they were satisfied doing so. Another 77 percent said they were optimistic about their future finances.

The number of young adults living in a multi-generational household — which can be any combination of grandparents, parents and adult children — saw a steep uptick during the recent recession, after being on the rise since 1980, said Kim Parker, the study’s lead author and a senior researcher with Pew’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. Historically, such high rates of moving back home haven’t been seen since the late 1940s.

Here’s an Associated Press piece on Yahoo News:

The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

[…]Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor’s degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.

[…]The figures are based on an analysis of 2011 Current Population Survey data by Northeastern University researchers and supplemented with material from Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University, and the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. They rely on Labor Department assessments of the level of education required to do the job in 900-plus U.S. occupations, which were used to calculate the shares of young adults with bachelor’s degrees who were “underemployed.”

About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.

Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.

The EPI is a left-wing think tank.

As if this were not bad enough, remember that the secular socialists have run the national debt up from 8 trillion to 16 trillion since taking over the House and Senate in January 2007. Labor union bailouts, green energy payoffs to Democrat fundraises, health care takeovers, and massive welfare spending, have to be paid back. Who is going to pay all of this back? Students with degrees in feminist studies and peace studies? And yet, incredibly, the government-run public school system and the universities have brainwashed these young fools into voting for their own dependence and enslavement. That’s what secularism and leftism offers young people: the road to serfdom.

News

Obama: 25% fewer male graduates than female graduates is a great accomplishment

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From CNS News.

Excerpt:

In an op-ed published Saturday in Newsweek, President Barack Obama marked the 40th anniversary of the enactment of Title IX–which bars gender discrimination in education—and noted that more women in the United States are now graduating from college than men, which he characterized as “a great accomplishment” for the nation.

“In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men,”Obama wrote. “This is a great accomplishment—not just for one sport or one college or even just for women but for America. And this is what Title IX is all about.”

According to the Census Bureau, 685,000 men and 916,000 women graduated from college in 2009 (the latest year for which statistics have been published). That means 25 percent fewer men received college degrees than women.

And:

In the nationwide collegiate class of 1975, which started college before Title IX was implemented, the males graduating from college outnumbered females, 505,000 to 418,000–meaning 17 percent fewer women graduated than men.

By 1985, according to Census Bureau data, the number of women graduating from college each year was outstripping the number of men. In that year, about 497,000 women graduated from college and 483,000 men. That gave women a margin over men of almost 3 percent.

In every year since 1985, according to the Census Bureau, women have outnumbered men in graduating from college, with women dramatically expanding their advantage over men in receiving college diplomas to the 25 percent advantage they achieved in 2009.

In his Newsweek op-ed, President Obama said Title IX helped America ensure what he called “equal education.”

It’s important to understand that the widespread unwillingness of men to get married, and their inability to provide for a family if they are married, have been caused by specific policies and laws, and not by a deficiency of “manhood”. From no-fault divorce to normalizing premarital sex to biased domestic violence laws to higher tax rates to false  accusations to discrimination in education to discrimination in hiring, and beyond – men are being actively discouraged and prevented from taking on the traditional role of being sole provider for their families. Pastors who expect to reverse this trend have to do more than resort to bellowing two-word slogans (“Man Up!”) at the dwindling numbers of men in their churches. This marriage strike problem is caused by policies and laws, and it requires a political and legal response.

Christians should be especially concerned about the presence of fathers in the home, given the evidence I blogged about before showing how the presence of quality fathers is essential for passing Christian beliefs on to children. Churches need to ask themselves tough questions: Are we teaching women how to choose men based on practical concerns and proven abilities in our churches? And are we doing a good job of attracting men to churches by promoting the masculine, practical aspects of Christianity that men like – like science, apologetics debates, economics and foreign policy?

Why is this weakening of men’s ability to graduate and get jobs a priority of the left? The left is dominated by feminist thought, and they do not want men having different roles than women in the home. It’s sad that many men who are ignorant of these threats to male leadership go along with it and then find out too late what the effects of their feminist sympathies are.

Commentary

Washington Post columnist bashes Obamacare

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The Washington Post is one of the most liberal newspapers, but not the worst. For example, further left there’s the New Republic and National Journal, which are basically Marxist. Well the article I’m looking at today was written by a columnist who has  worked for both National Journal and New Republic. He’s even work for Newsweek which is just Democrat propaganda. Surprisingly, his WaPo article is actually fairly accurate about the problems with Obamacare, although his opinions of what to do instead are still left-wing.

He lists 5 reasons why Obamacare is bad policy:

  1. It increases uncertainty and decreases confidence when recovery from the Great Recession requires more confidence and less uncertainty.
  2. The ACA discourages job creation by raising the price of hiring.
  3. Uncontrolled health spending is the U.S. system’s main problem — and the ACA makes it worse.
  4. Obama’s program also worsens the federal budget problem.
  5. The ACA discriminates against the young in favor of the old.

Here’s are the details on numbers 2,4 and 5:

(2) The ACA discourages job creation by raising the price of hiring. This is basic economics. If you increase the price of labor, companies will buy less of it. Requiring employers to buy health insurance for some workers makes them more expensive, at least in the short run. Particularly vulnerable are low-skilled workers, notes economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute. Because the employer mandate exempts firms with fewer than 50 workers, there’s a huge incentive for firms to stop at 49, she says.

(4) Obama’s program also worsens the federal budget problem. Driven by Medicare and Medicaid, health care already exceeds one-fourth of the budget and is headed toward a third. It’s the crux of the problem. So Obama creates another huge health program. The administration’s retort: the program lowers the budget deficit. This is rhetorical hocus-pocus. Here’s what happens. From 2012 to 2022, the ACA raises federal spending by $1.762 trillion, estimates the Congressional Budget Office. However, all of this and a bit more is offset by tax increases and assumed cuts in Medicare. But these tax increases and cuts could have been used to shrink the huge budget deficits that pre-existed Obamacare. Now they can’t; moreover, the Medicare cuts might be repealed or reduced.

(5) The ACA discriminates against the young in favor of the old. Government policy already does this through payroll taxes that have young workers subsidizing Social Security and Medicare benefits. The ACA compounds the effect by forcing some young Americans to buy insurance at artificially high premiums that would pay for the care of a sicker, older population.

Higher unemployment, more debt and passing the costs on to the younger generation who can’t even find jobs with their worthless degrees in political correctness.

I think there are a lot of leftist nuts who are getting increasingly disengaged with Obama’s plan to “help the poor”. It’s not working because Obama has no idea how to help the poor. The way to help the poor is to give them jobs, and the way to give them jobs is to give more incentives to the private sector job creators, and the way to give incentives to the private sector job creators is to lower their taxes and decrease their regulatory burden. That’s what would actually work. Obama did the opposite, and nowhere is this more visible than in his Obamacare boondoogle.