Tag Archives: Obama

News

Number of Americans not in labor force hits record high of 87,897,000

2 Comments
Employment to population ratio down 4.5% since Democrats took the House and Senate in January 2007
Employment to population ratio down 4.5% since Democrats took control of the House and Senate in January 2007

The Obama administration has pursued an economic policy of raising taxes on job creators, imposing regulatory burdens on businesses and shoveling mountains of taxpayer money into the hands of green energy firms which are often linked to Democrat fundraisers. Does it work to create jobs? Let’s see.

A record number of Americans are unemployed

From Breitbart.

Excerpt:

Amid disappointing unemployment numbers that fell 80,000 jobs short of projections, another number is raising eyebrows: the number of Americans not in the labor force has hit a record high 87,897,000.

This figure explains why overall unemployment dropped from 8.3% to 8.2%, as the Department of Labor’s unemployment figure does not include people who have given up hope and are not actively seeking employment.

When the number of individuals who have stopped looking for a job and/or who are working part-time but desire full-time employment is included–a figure known as the “underemployment rate”–real unemployment stands at 19.1%.

If you want to know if the President is doing a good job of creating jobs, just count the number of people who are unemployed. If the number of people who are unemployed is at a RECORD HIGH, then you need to elect a new President. Preferably someone who understands basic economics.

The real unemployment rate is 14.5%

From the American Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

Recall that back in 2009, White House economists Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer used their old-fashioned Keynesian model to predict how the $800 billion stimulus would affect employment. According to their model—as displayed in the above chart, updated—unemployment should be around 5.8% today.

But the true measure of U.S. unemployment is far worse:

1. If the size of the U.S. labor force as a share of the total population was the same as it was when Barack Obama took office—65.7% then vs. 63.8% today down from last month—the U-3 unemployment rate would be 10.9%.

2. But what if you take into the account the aging of the Baby Boomers, which means the labor force participation (LFP) rate should be trending lower. Indeed, it has been doing just that since 2000. Before the Great Recession, the Congressional Budget Office predicted what the LFP would be in 2012, assuming such demographic changes. Using that number, the real unemployment rate would be 10.5%.

3. Of course, the LFP rate usually falls during recessions. Yet even if you discount for that and the aging issue, the real unemployment rate would be 9.4%.

4. Then there’s the broader, U-6 measure of unemployment which includes the discouraged plus part-timers who wish they had full time work. That unemployment rate, perhaps the truest measure of the labor market’s health, is still a sky-high 14.5%.

5. The employment-population ratio dipped to 58.5% vs. 61% in December 2008. An historically low level of the U.S. population is actually working.

People keep talking about intelligent Barack Obama is. But shouldn’t we judge a person’s intelligence based on what they can produce? If you measure Obama’s intelligence based on his results – adding trillions and trillions of dollars to the debt while lowering the number of people who have jobs to a record low – then a fair-minded observer would say that Barack Obama is a person of low intelligence. He simply is out of his league. He would be out of his league if he tried to run a lemonade stand. If no one – Republican or Democrat – would hire this man to work in a private business that they owned, why would we ever elect him to be President?

Polemics

Should young people vote for Barack Obama and Obamacare?

Leave a comment
The real inequality: young America and old America
The real inequality: young America and old America

From Donald Sensing at Sense of Events blog.

Excerpt:

Shikha Dalmia, responds to Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, who was so, “Shell shocked by the shellacking that the Solicitor General Donald Verrilli received at the hearing Tuesday, [that] she went into a deep sulk and threw the intellectual equivalent of a hissy fit.” Shikha observes:

In our current health care system, a mix of taxpayers; (rich) hospitals/providers and (even richer) private insurers are stuck with the tab for uncompensated care. There are many problems with this. But isn’t it at least more compassionate than ObamaCare that would force asset-poor young people – trying to pay off their college debt and hang on to some beer money – to subsidize the coverage of relatively wealthier prospective geezers? If maximizing compassion is the issue, shouldn’t we stick with what we’ve got?

In other words, under Obamacare the young overpay for health insurance in order to subsidize the old, whose medical costs are magnitudes higher than those of the young. That is a key feature of the “individual mandate” that makes it mandatory to buy health insurance under Obamacare. I remember reading during the SCOTUS hearings that men and women younger than 30 (or so) average using about $1,800 of health insurance per year, but will have to pay $5,400.

It’s very important to understand that when government gets involved with spending money on handing out goodies, that it is tempting for them to buy the votes of those who are politically informed with the money taken from those who don’t know a thing about real life.

Now consider these numbers from socialist Europe – where Obama’s plan is a little further along.

Excerpt:

Youth unemployment now exceeds 50pc in both Spain and Greece as the number of people out of work in the eurozone as a whole hit a 15-year high of 17.2m.

The unemployment rate among Spain’s under-25s rose to 50.5pc in January, and to 50.4pc in Greece in December, according to the latest available data from Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics office. It compared with an average eurozone youth unemployment rate of 21.6pc. One of the lowest rates of youth unemployment is in Germany, where it remained at 8.2pc in February.

The rise in Spain and Greece reflects the deep financial woes of both countries, which are in the midst of far-reaching and highly unpopular austerity programmes, considered necessary by the broader EU to reduce huge deficits.

Spain’s unemployment rate now stands at 23.6pc, compared with a eurozone average of 10.8pc. The extent of Spain’s problems are further underlined by a housing market in crisis, with prices expected to fall the most on record this year. One-in-four homeowners in the country owes more than their property is worth.

I find it so sad that kids are brainwashed by unionized public school teachers to support nonsense like global warming, while despising free market capitalism. And then they go out and vote for more and more government, so that their “teachers” can be paid more and more. They will never fix their worldviews until they get out into the real world, and by then it they will have voted in many elections.

News

Obama’s new economic plan: more money for unions and Solyndras

1 Comment

Obama says that we need to take taxpayer money away from job creators and give it to teacher unions and green energy companies run by Obama fundraisers.

Excerpt:

Obama said he wants to give public schools the “resources” they need to hire and reward good teachers.

“So I don’t want folks in Washington to be bashing teachers,” he said.  “I don’t want them to defend the status quo.  I want us to give schools the resources they need to hire good teachers, reward great teachers.”

Of course, the evidence shows that throwing money at public schools doesn’t produce better outcomes. The right solution is to let parents choose the schools their children would attend with a voucher. That works, but Obama is opposed to that because it would take money away from Obama campaign – which is funded by money taken from union dues. So this part of Obama’s plan is just about funneling money through the teacher unions into his campaign war chest.

Next:

Obama additionally said he wants to “double down” on the money he has already put into solar and wind power, biofuels and electric batteries.

“Let’s double down on clean energy that has never been more promising — solar and wind and biofuels, and energy efficiency, electric batteries,” he said.  “That’s what we need to be investing in.”

Again, we have seen with Solyndra and the other similar companies that go bankrupt, that green energy is nothing but Obama handing out taxpayer money to companies linked to people who give donations to Democrats running for office. The purpose of wasting money on green energy companies isn’t to reduce gas prices for poor people. Wasting money on green energy actually raises gas prices by devaluing our currency through deficit spending and money printing. The purpose of green energy grants is to reward people who fund Obama’s election campaign. If Obama cared at all about families facing high gas prices, he would have approved the Keystone XL pipeline – and he didn’t.

Next:

President Barack Obama has released a new video in which he praises the nation’s largest abortion business, Planned Parenthood, which is a prime endorser of his presidential re-election campaign.

“For you and for most Americans, protecting women’s health is a mission that stands above politics,” President Obama says in a video message for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “And yet over the past year we’ve had to stand up to politicians who wanted to deny millions of women the care they rely on and inject themselves into the decisions that are best made between a woman and her doctor.”

“Let’s be clear here, women are not an interest group. They’re mothers, and daughters, and sisters, and wives. They’re half of this country and they’re perfectly capable of making their own choices about their health,” Obama says.

Again, Planned Parenthood gets hundreds of million dollars of taxpayer money to kill babies, then they turn around and hand a bunch of their profits back to Obama with campaign contributions. All of this high sounding rhetoric from Obama is nothing but spending taxpayer money like a drunken sailor that will come back to him in the form of political contributions. That what all this “brother’s keeper” rhetoric amounts to.

More here from Investors Business Daily.