Author Topic: 3.5 million jobs  (Read 1858 times)

loco

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3.5 million jobs
« on: October 07, 2009, 07:21:15 AM »
Creating Jobs

President Obama’s first priority in confronting the economic crisis is to put Americans back to work. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan signed by the President will spur job creation while making long-term investments in health care, education, energy, and infrastructure. Among other objectives, the recovery plan will increase production of alternative energy, modernize and weatherize buildings and homes, expand broadband technology across the country, and computerize the health care system. The recovery plan will save or create about 3.5 million jobs while investing in priorities that create sustainable economic growth for the future.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/economy/

loco

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Re: 3.5 million jobs
« Reply #1 on: October 07, 2009, 07:22:25 AM »
October 4, 2009

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve board, said on Sunday that the latest job report showing the nation’s unemployment at 9.8 percent was “pretty awful” and said he expected the figure to climb even higher.

“My own suspicion is that we’re going to penetrate the 10 percent barrier and stay there for a while before we start down,” he said in an appearance on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on ABC.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05greenspan.html


Soul Crusher

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Re: 3.5 million jobs
« Reply #2 on: October 07, 2009, 07:27:38 AM »
October 4, 2009

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve board, said on Sunday that the latest job report showing the nation’s unemployment at 9.8 percent was “pretty awful” and said he expected the figure to climb even higher.

“My own suspicion is that we’re going to penetrate the 10 percent barrier and stay there for a while before we start down,” he said in an appearance on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on ABC.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05greenspan.html



I said from Day 1 the Stimulus Bill would be a miserable failure.  Check this out. 

PROJECTIONS VS. RESULTS:


Soul Crusher

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Re: 3.5 million jobs
« Reply #3 on: October 07, 2009, 07:35:04 AM »
Mind you this was from June 2009!  We know what has heppened since then.

 

Soul Crusher

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Re: 3.5 million jobs
« Reply #4 on: October 07, 2009, 07:48:36 AM »
What The September Unemployment Rate Tells Us (Or, How I Learned To Start Worrying and Hate the BLS Data)
October 5, 2009


Latest unemployment data has come out and the people who were claiming “ah, but job losses are slowing” were smacked down and sent to the corner to think about what they’ve done.

The unemployment rate was up .1%, from 9.7% to 9.8%. That’s not so bad, right?

To speak frankly, the unemployment rate tells so little of the story at this point that its hardly a useful metric. If you’re looking for a useful metric, start looking at the raw unemployment numbers.

The problem with the unemployment rate is that it doesn’t compare the employed with the unemployed. Instead, it compares people who are employed with those who don’t have jobs, but have looked for a job in the last 4 weeks”. This make a certain kind of sense; we don’t want to count stay-at-home dads or retired individuals as unemployed.

However, this means that an exodous from the workforce could mask the severity of the job situation. To illustrate, I’ve created a visual:

Let’s say we have 20 people in the workforce and 2 of them fit the technical definition for unemployed, which means that they’re actively looking for work. That gives us an unemployment rate of 10%.

Now, let’s say one of the unemployed people got tired of being unemployed and decided to go back to school. She has now removed herself from the labor force, so we don’t count her when we count unemployed people. Let’s also say that one of the employed people lost his job and instead of looking for a new one, he decided to simply retire.

As you can see we haven’t added any jobs… in fact we have fewer jobs than we did before. But we took a higher percentage of people out of the “unemployed” group than we did out of the “employed” group. It’s now 1 person unemployed and 17 people employed. We’ve “slashed” the unemployment rate to 5.5%.

This current job report is actually a perfect example of this. We lost 785,000 jobs this past month. That makes it the the biggest month of job losses since March. But the number of people in the unemployed group rose only 214,000. This is because  we saw over twice that number simply leave the work force altogether.

If we took employment numbers for this month compared it to the labor force for last month, we would have an unemployment rate of 10.2%… almost a half a percent higher than the one we have!

I try to be an optimist, but it is hard to see this report as anything but a disaster. Furthermore, we are so far into the implementation of the stimulus, that I have a hard time seeing it as anything but a huge failure. I understand that only about 10% of the stimulus has actually been spent, but part of the point of the stimulus was to get money out into the economy in order to inject a little cash flow into the situation. That means that a huge part of the success of the stimulus relied on getting the money out in a timely manner.

I know that defenders of stimulus theory would object that it takes time to spend $800 billion and that you can’t spend that much very quickly without massive fraud. To which I reply: “Well, duh.” I think that’s a great argument against the stimulus and I wish they had brought that up back in February and March instead of bashing people like me for bringing that up back in February and March.

Back to the point, we have seen job growth in only one month out of the last 17. We need to stop focusing on the unemployment rate and start looking at raw jobs data. Only when we see the raw number of jobs start rising consistently can we be confident of economic recovery.

Note: To be fair, jobs tend to be a lagging indicator, but outside the stock market increases, I’m seeing little reason to be optimistic. And, quite honestly, the stock market seems to be very excited about absolutely nothing. It’s like they’re throwing a champagne party because the world hasn’t ended, neglecting the fact that it is still on fire.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This guy is really good on raw numbers.

www.politicalmath.wordpr ess.com


Colossus_500

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Re: 3.5 million jobs
« Reply #5 on: October 07, 2009, 08:36:07 AM »
C H U R P   C H U R P   C H U R P !!!!!!

Soul Crusher

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Re: 3.5 million jobs
« Reply #6 on: October 07, 2009, 08:38:40 AM »
C H U R P   C H U R P   C H U R P !!!!!!

Colossus_500

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Re: 3.5 million jobs
« Reply #7 on: October 07, 2009, 08:39:42 AM »

tonymctones

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Re: 3.5 million jobs
« Reply #8 on: October 07, 2009, 08:53:28 AM »
to borrow a line from 240

Crickets out in full effect.


Soul Crusher

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Re: 3.5 million jobs
« Reply #9 on: October 07, 2009, 08:57:14 AM »
This kid is really good. 


loco

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Re: 3.5 million jobs
« Reply #10 on: October 08, 2009, 07:37:54 AM »
Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Bueller?  Bueller?

12secGT

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Re: 3.5 million jobs
« Reply #11 on: October 08, 2009, 09:41:13 AM »
Actually, if you consider those who have stopped looking and had their unempl. bennies expire and those who have lost full time jobs but found part time ones the true unemployment number is around 22%. This lack of reporting also exists in the % of those who do not have healthcare coverage. The true numbers do not deduct the young work force who opt out of coverage because they want the cash in their paychecks and feel they are too young to get sick. It is stupid because I personally learned this the hard way when I tore my ACL and I didn't have healthcare. Cost me over $40k to get my knee back. So you see, politics are at play here. Just like this article above. There is nothing in Obama's plan to really create jobs, and the stimulus plan has not created a single job as roughly 12 % of the billions appropriated have been allocated to the states. The states are using it to pay for mounting debt caused by medicare and other expenses.