Tag Archives: Miserable Failure

News

President Food Stamp: growth in food stamp rolls is 75 times number of jobs created

Leave a comment

The Weekly Standard explains.

Excerpt:

With the latest jobs report, it is now the case that “Under Obama, Food Stamp Growth [Is] 75 Times Greater Than Job Creation,” according to statistics compiled by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee. “For Every Person Added to Jobs Rolls Since January 2009, 75 People Added To Food Stamp Rolls.”

Since January 2009, as the chart shows, a net of 194,000 new jobs have been created. During that same time, 14.7 million have been added to the food stamp rolls.

“Simply put, the President’s policies have not produced jobs. During his time in office, 14.7 million people were added to the food stamp rolls. Over that same time, only 194,000 jobs were created—thus 76 people went on food stamps for every one that found a job,” says Senator Jeff Sessions, ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee. “This is a product of low growth. Post-recession economic growth in 2010 was 2.4%, and dropped in 2011 to 1.8%. This year it has dropped again to 1.77%. Few, if any, net jobs will be created with growth of less than 2%.”

This is unacceptable, and we need a change.

News

Labor force participation at 31-year low: record number of Americans out of work

Leave a comment

CNS News reports.

Full text:

The number of Americans whom the U.S. Department of Labor counted as “not in the civilian labor force” in August hit a record high of 88,921,000.

The Labor Department counts a person as not in the civilian labor force if they are at least 16 years old, are not in the military or an institution such as a prison, mental hospital or nursing home, and have not actively looked for a job in the last four weeks. The department counts a person as in “the civilian labor force” if they are at least 16, are not in the military or an institution such as a prison, mental hospital or nursing home, and either do have a job or have actively looked for one in the last four weeks.

In July, there were 155,013,000 in the U.S. civilian labor force. In August that dropped to 154,645,000—meaning that on net 368,000 people simply dropped out of the labor force last month and did not even look for a job.

There were also 119,000 fewer Americans employed in August than there were in July. In July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 142,220,000 Americans working. But, in August, there were only 142,101,000 Americans working.

Despite the fact that fewer Americans were employed in August than July, the unemployment rate ticked down from 8.3 in July to 8.1. That is because so many people dropped out of the labor force and stopped looking for work. The unemployment rate is the percentage of people in the labor force (meaning they had a job or were actively looking for one) who did not have a job.

The Bureau of Labor Statistic also reported that in August the labor force participation rate (the percentage of the people in the civilian non-institutionalized population who either had a job or were actively looking for one) dropped to a 30-year low of 63.5 percent, down from 63.7 percent in July. The last time the labor force participation rate was as low as 63.5 percent was in September 1981.

Let’s see how things are going for Obama’s biggest supporters – the young people who have been brainwashed by public schools to hate corporations , entrepreneurship and free market capitalism.

CNN Money reports:

The drop in the unemployment rate in August isn’t particularly good news for the economy — it’s driven mostly by nearly 400,000 people dropping out of the labor force, rather than more people finding jobs.

But those dropping out aren’t so much the discouraged 30-, 40- or 50-year olds. In fact, the Labor Department said there was a modest decline in the overall number of discouraged job seekers.

The drop is because so many young adults, aged 16 to 24, are no longer looking for work.

There were 453,000 fewer young adults with jobs in August than in July. But despite that plunge, only 27,000 more young people were looking for new jobs. Most apparently stopped looking and left the labor force. And those numbers take into account seasonal factors such as younger workers returning to school.

As a result, the percentage of young people who are counted in the labor force fell to its lowest level since 1955.

But there is one sector of the economy that is still doing fine – the parasitic public sector is doing fine.

CNS News reports:

There was good news for American workers in August—if government was their employer.

The unemployment rate for government wage and salaries workers dropped from 5.7 percent in July to 5.1 percent in August. At the same time, the number of government wage and salary workers counted as unemployed dropped by 123,000 people from 1,182,000 in July to 1,059,000 in August.

[…]Answering questions from reporters on June 8, President Obama said that the private sector was “doing fine” and that the “weaknesses” in the economy were in government.

“The private sector is doing fine,” said Obama. “Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government, oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.”

Government workers live off of the money confiscated from businesses, who have to please customers by trading them valuable goods and services in order to make money.

This is not unexpected. Socialism is the destroyer of prosperity. In 2008, we elected an unqualified Marxist ideologue as President. He wrecked the economy because he doesn’t understand economics. He’s put us on the path to becoming Greece. In November, I hope that we’ll get it right for a change.

Commentary

Thomas Sowell and the New York Times agree on why Obama fails

10 Comments
Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell

An editorial by famous economist Thomas Sowell at Right Wing News. (H/T Doug Ross’ links)

Excerpt:

After reading Barack Obama’s book “Dreams from My Father,” it became painfully clear that he has not been searching for the truth, because he assumed from an early age that he had already found the truth — and now it was just a question of filling in the details and deciding how to change things.

Obama did not simply happen to encounter a lot of people on the far left fringe during his life. As he spells out in his book, he actively sought out such people. There is no hint of the slightest curiosity on his part about other visions of the world that might be weighed against the vision he had seized upon.

As Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School has pointed out, Obama made no effort to take part in the marketplace of ideas with other faculty members when he was teaching a law course there. What would be the point, if he already knew the truth and knew that they were wrong?

This would be a remarkable position to take, even for a learned scholar who had already spent decades canvassing a vast amount of information and views on many subjects. But Obama was already doctrinaire at a very early age — and ill-informed or misinformed on both history and economics.

[…]Barack Obama is one of those people who are often wrong but never in doubt. When he burst upon the national political scene as a presidential candidate in 2008, even some conservatives were impressed by his confidence.

But confident ignorance is one of the most dangerous qualities in a leader of a nation. If he has the rhetorical skills to inspire the same confidence in himself by others, then you have the ingredients for national disaster.

He gives a few examples, but he’s not the only person to have noticed this. Consider the following article from the radically left-wing New York Times, of all places. (H/T Forbes)

Excerpt:

But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies, said Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, adding that the same thing happened to his former boss. “There’s a reinforcing quality,” he said, a tendency for presidents to think, I’m the best at this.

[…]He may not always be as good at everything as he thinks, including politics. While Mr. Obama has given himself high grades for his tenure in the White House — including a “solid B-plus” for his first year — many voters don’t agree, citing everything from his handling of the economy to his unfulfilled pledge that he would be able to unite Washington to his claim that he would achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Those were not the only times Mr. Obama may have overestimated himself: he has also had a habit of warning new hires that he would be able to do their jobs better than they could.

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Though he never ran a large organization before becoming president, he initially dismissed internal concerns about management and ended up with a factionalized White House and a fuzzier decision-making process than many top aides wanted.

What you have in Barack Obama is a man who governs based on his own intuitions and sense of superiority. He’s not grounded in facts, and he’s not willing to listen to anyone else’s view if it disagrees with those intuitions. He wants to be praised without having achieved anything praiseworthy. Where did this attitude of ignorance coupled with arrogance come from? Would you hire a person like that to work with you?

UPDATE: Stuart Schneiderman answers the question I asked about where this attitude comes from:

Obsessed with perfection and fixated on his own prowess Obama is suffering from vainglorious self-puffery, self-esteem to the nth power.

He is the reductio ad absurdum of a culture of self-esteem that does not reward achievement but that teaches people to keep telling themselves that they are the best, regardless.

When the most powerful leader of the free world needs to compete and win at making chili or playing pool he is trying to find a sliver of evidence that would protect him against the encroaching suspicion that his greatness is just a bunch of media-drive hype.