Friday, January 6, 2012
Unemployment rate: 8.5%, 10.9% or 11.45%?
There is a new jobs report out, with the usual caveats that the work force is shrinking, but the nominal unemployment rate is down to 8.5%. That’s the number which counts politically.
The rate would be 10.9% if the same number of people were in the workforce as when Obama took office.
How about the employment rate -- the most-important number in there, since it controls the taxing capacity of the government.
That's not good -- it's down a touch and has flat-lined now for basically two years.
Here's the problem with this report -- the non-institutional working-age population went from 240.441 million to 240.584, a gain of 143,000 people of working age. But the number of employed people went down from 141.070 million to 140.681 -- a loss of 389,000. Adding the two, which is the correct way to look at it, the economy on a population-adjusted basis lost 532,000 jobs.
It won't surprise anyone that as of December, the real implied unemployment rate was 11.4% (final chart) - basically where it has been ever since 2009 - and at 2.9% delta to reported, represents the widest divergence to reported data since the early 1980s. And because we know this will be the next question, extending this lunacy, America will officially have no unemployed, when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5%, which should be just before the presidential election.
Post-Iowa Advice for the Paul Campaign
The morning after the Iowa caucuses—wanting to be useful in some tiny way—I thought of some advice I wanted to give to the Ron Paul campaign. After the obligatory but sincere “Congratulations on RP’s strong showing in Iowa” and “I commend the campaign on how it’s being run,” I suggested:
Push the excellent foreign policy video through the web. Edit it down or put something shorter-but-similar together for TV in NH and SC. This is a real weakness for RP which needs to be addressed. “Soft on defense” is his Achilles heel for millions of otherwise-friendly conservatives. Keep emphasizing active-duty military personnel contributions. Have military veterans campaign with him on the stump and appear in ads. It’s a big problem that has to be addressed more head-on. Go on the offensive. Turn a weakness into a strength. RP’s willingness to call attention to Gingrich’s draft-dodging is a step in the right direction. Call a spade a spade. It’s easy to be a hero with someone else’s life. (Assuming the reported facts surrounding Gingrich’s deferments are correct; you have to make sure you really have the goods before leveling the accusation.)
Make the connection between liberty and God explicit. RP is obviously enamored with liberty. But why? How do you connect with moralists, with traditional conservatives, who equate libertarianism with libertinism?Vitter: Obama 'Shredded Constitution' & Gingrich: Defund NLRB
The first, he says, “will be some sort of legal action.” And, he adds, "clearly, clearly this is going to impact other nominations."
Vitter says all four of the president’s four recent recess appointments (three new members were also placed on the National Labor Relations Board) are “illegal and unconstitutional”.
“He’s gone beyond what any president has done and really shredded the constitution in practice with regard to recess appointments.
Vitter, who serves on the Senate Banking Committee, also made it clear that he and his fellow Republicans in the Senate will do what ever they can to halt future presidential appointments.
“It’s going to lead to more fights about nominations,” Vitter says.
Speaking at a rally in Plymouth, N.H., the Republican presidential candidate said cutting money from the agency would be the "correct response" to Obama's move.
"The answer to an imperial president is a Congress which stands on its own rights. And the correct response to what the president just did would be for the Congress to zero out and refuse to fund the National Labor Relations Board," Gingrich said.
The World’s Most Dishonest Newspaper
Verbatim Post
When I was last in the Big Bagel (as I call Noo Yawk), a policeman who’d been awarded countless commendations for bravery over 22 years of front-line service was allegedly murdered in cold blood by a black drug dealer. Officer Peter Figoski was 47 and had raised his four daughters on his own. His last act of duty was to respond to a robbery in Brooklyn, where the fleeing black thug reputedly shot him in the face.
The accused, Lamont Pride, was only free at the time of the shooting because he had been let loose for illegally possessing a knife by a black female judge. The ex-con was also wanted in North Carolina for allegedly shooting someone in the foot over the summer.
The day after Figoski’s murder, while people remained in shock at the cold-blooded way the black thug shot an officer who had not drawn his gun, The New York Times ran an editorial praising the state of Pennsylvania for taking another black police killer off the death list. Mumia Abu-Jamal—or some ridiculous name like that—had even more cold-bloodedly killed a police officer lying injured on the ground. The timing was such that the Philadelphia policeman’s widow (since 1981) remarked upon it. It must have amused Jill Abramson, the new Times editor, for a slain cop’s widow to call her unfeeling. Abramson and her type do not much care what working stiffs think of them. To the contrary, they relish the fact that cops, firemen, blue-collar workers, and their ilk do not read or believe the Times.
I do not know Jill Abramson, but rarely have I seen a homelier woman. In a New Yorker hagiography, she was described as coming from a household that ordered and read two copies of the Times—a bit of a waste I would think, but who am I to judge what middle-class Jewish rug salesmen do with their money? All I know is that on her way to the Times building five or so years ago, Abramson was hit by a truck whose front was totally defaced, while she suffered a few broken bones. Now she cheers for a cop killer escaping the lethal injection while ignoring the fact that a black judge let a black thug wanted in another state walk the streets and kill.
The Times is a very nasty piece of work. It aims its hatred at normal white Christian Americans while filling its pages with same-sex marriage announcements, profiles of rap “artists,” and front-page coverage of Catholic priests’ sex abuses.
The Times only prints news that fits its policies. Their latest false outrage is the discovery on Facebook of hostile comments by NYPD officers about the West Indian American Day Parade. Cops used words such as “savages” and “animals” to describe the random shootings of parade watchers, words that had the Times furious with indignation. What words should the fuzz have used? A 56-year-old mother watching the parade is shot dead and the Times is indignant because some cop wrote that the shooter was an animal?
Obviously the Times’ agenda is to undermine the police by depicting them as racist and then collect a couple of prizes for exposing police corruption. Not a single word concerning color was used by the cops—some of whom happened to be black—yet the newspaper played it up in its front page for a couple of days, triggering the usual reaction from opportunistic local politicians calling the incident “disgusting” and “racist.” (The pols avoided mentioning the shootings.)
Blacks are 23 percent of New York City’s population, yet in the first half of 2009 they committed 80 percent of all shootings. Whites, who are 35 percent of the population, committed 1.8 percent of the shootings. So the Times recently ran an extremely long story over two pages about a young black who whined about how the police tend to profile him when he walks around his neighborhood at night. That the cops failed to profile all white people for the tiny minority of whites who commit shootings is deemed an outrage and proof of police racism.
A black man was recently acquitted for carrying an illegal gun by a jury because the arresting officer was a member of the NYPD Facebook group that had called the West Indian troublemakers “animals.” When the Times was quoted in court, the jury was not told—and the Times had not mentioned—the fact that the arresting officer was black.