500,000 JOBS LOST IN APRIL

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Posted on 3rd May 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Not only did the BLS add 193,000 phantom jobs in April, but the companies that actually employ people cut the hours of their employees dramatically. Americans brought home less pay in April than they did in March, even though there were supposedly more people employed. No wonder the stock market is soaring. Retailers supposedly added jobs while slashing hours. The liberal douchebag MSM faux journalist that wrote this piece doesn’t want to make the logical conclusion from this data.

There are only two possibilities. Why would companies be adding employees and slashing hours at the same time. That is ridiculous. If companies have increased demand they increase the hours of their existing staff. If the demand is even greater they higher more employees. The logical conclusion is that the BLS birth death adjustment is nothing but bullshit. Companies are seeing declining demand. They not only did not add new employees, they are cutting hours of the existing employees.

The only other possibility is OBAMACARE. Companies are desperately trying to keep the average number of hours for their employees under 30 to avoid the horrors of Obamacare. This might explain why retailers, restaurants and other small businesses might be hiring more workers and slashing the hours of the existing staff. Nothing like more people in the new government healthcare plan.

This news is outstanding. I think the stock market should get to 20,000 in no time.  

Dark side to jobs report: Big drop in hours worked

Commentary: Shorter work week equivalent to 500,000 jobs lost

By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The April employment report exceeded expectations, with 165,000 jobs created and a welcome drop in the unemployment rate to 7.5%.

But there was a dark side to the report: Total hours worked fell sharply, and the total amount of money earned by U.S. workers actually declined from the month before.

“Aggregate weekly hours” is an obscure series of data in the jobs report, but it’s vital to understanding how strong the economy is performing. As the name implies, it measures the total number of hours worked, which is what matters for sizing up overall growth in the economy.

Usually, we focus just on the number of new jobs created and the unemployment rate, but the number of hours we work matters just as much, if not more, to our economic well-being.

Hours worked in April fell 0.4%, equivalent to the loss of more than 500,000 jobs.

Think of it this way: If companies had hired all 12 million unemployed people in April, but had cut everyone’s hours in half, the unemployment rate would have fallen to zero, but we’d be much worse off. Our paychecks would be much smaller, and the economy would contract violently.

In April, companies hired 165,000 more workers, but they cut everyone’s hours (on average) by 12 minutes. That doesn’t sound like much of a decline, but spread out over the 135 million-strong work force, the decline in hours worked is the equivalent of firing more than 500,000 workers while keeping hours steady.

The 0.4% decline in hours worked in April means the economy isn’t quite as strong as you’d think on first glance.

For instance, some analysts applauded the 29,000 gain in retail-sector jobs in April as a sign that consumer spending is holding up well in the face of the fiscal drag caused by the tax hikes and government spending cuts.

But aggregate weekly hours worked in retail plunged by 0.7% in April, which is the equivalent of cutting 11,000 jobs. Suddenly, the report doesn’t look so rosy.

COUNTRY ADDS 165,000 JOBS – BLS BIRTH DEATH EXCEL MODEL ADDS 193,000 JOBS

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Posted on 3rd May 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Wall Street is using the addition of 165,000 burger flipping, drink order taking, floor sweeping jobs to rally to new all-time highs. It’s the reason of the day, when anyone with two brain cells knows that the market would have soared if the number was 50,000. With Ben Bernanke pumping $85 billion of heroin into the veins of Wall Street on a monthly basis, the big swinging dicks will keep swinging. Their HFT supercomputers are programmed to buy. It will work until it doesn’t.

But in the real world, the number of working age Americans increased by 180,000, so today’s number doesn’t even keep up with population growth. A BLS drone with an excel spreadsheet model created 193,000 jobs out of thin air. The BLS is guessing that is how many jobs were added by small businesses in April. With increasing taxes, lower consumer spending, looming Obamacare taxes and regulations, do you really think small businesses are adding employees in great numbers? Really?

In the real world the percentage of people in the labor force is at a 34 year low. Sounds like a reason for a stock market rally. There are 1.6 million more Americans employed today than one year ago – of course most of the jobs are as temps or in low paying service jobs. Over this same time frame the working age population grew by 2.4 million. Surely this means the unemployment rate went up. It’s just basic math. But NO. The unemployment rate has plunged from 8.1% to 7.5%.

You gotta love government drone economists that do the bidding of their masters. All you have to do is pretend that 1.6 million Americans willingly left the labor force and do not want a job anymore. Why would they want a job in the midst of the worst economic environment since the Great Depression? Racking up $50,000 of student loan debt going to the University of Phoenix or developing a back ache to get on SSDI for life is much easier than working at a job.

The American Dream – because you’d have to be asleep to believe it.  

WHAT ABOUT MARINE BIOLOGIST?

9 comments

Posted on 29th April 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

Don’t tell the doofuses that are paying us $100,000 that they are going to get a $57,000 per year job. They should have become Marine Biologists.

 

And The Highest Paid College Majors Are…

 
Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/29/2013 15:48 -0400

Presented with little comment but perhaps it is time to rethink that $100,000 loan and the extended MBA program…

 

  • Petroleum Engineering: $93,500
  • Computer Engineering: $71,700
  • Chemical Engineering: $67,600
  • Computer Science: $64,800
  • Aerospace/Aeronautical/Astronautical Engineering: $64,400
  • Mechanical Engineering: $64,000
  • Electrical/Electronics and Communications Engineering: $63,400
  • Management Information Systems/Business: $63,100
  • Engineering Technology: $62,200
  • Finance: $57,400

DO YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT COLLEGE DEGREE?

30 comments

Posted on 14th April 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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The number of 18 to 24 year olds rose from 27.3 million to 30.7 million between 2000 and 2010, a 12.5% increase. The percentage of 18 to 24 year olds enrolled in college rose from 9.7 million (35.5%) to 12.6 million (41.2%) over the same time frame. So even though the overall population of 18 to 24 year olds has grown by 12.5%, the percentage in college has risen by 30%. This is a fascinating development because test scores reveal that students have gotten dumber since 2000.

Over this time frame average SAT scores have fallen. In 2012 1.66 million students took the SAT exam and 43% met the minimum score necessary to achieve a B minus average in their first year of college. That means that 700,000 high school seniors were intelligent enough to attend college. Based on these scores, there are only between 2.8 million to 4.2 million 18 to 24 year olds that have the necessary ability to attend college. But, somehow there are 12.6 million attending college.

For the 2010–11 academic year, the average annual price for undergraduate tuition, fees, room, and board was $13,564 at public institutions (including $5,076 for in-state tuition) and $32,026 at private, not-for-profit and for-profit institutions. That’s a pretty penny to be paying when two thirds of the kids in college shouldn’t be there.

Of course we all know how these kids are able to attend college. The government has lured millions of young people into debt servitude by handing out hundreds of billions in cheap loans for college. Total student loan debt now exceeds $1 trillion and federal student loans outstanding exceed $600 billion, headed to over $1 trillion by the end of the decade.

Banks wrote off $3 billion of student loan debt in just the first two months of 2013, up more than 36% from the year-ago
period, as many graduates remain jobless, underemployed or cash-strapped in a slow U.S. economic recover. Delinquencies have spiked, with about 17% of the nearly 40 million student loan borrowers at least 90 days past due on their repayments, a February report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank showed. So, while students are defaulting at a record pace, the Federal government accelerates the issuance of new loans. They aren’t worried about getting paid back. They’ll just stick the American taxpayer with the losses. The purpose has been to artificially deflate the unemployment rate and hoping their Keynesian fantasies would eventually lead to an economic recovery. But it didn’t happen.

The Obama “Big Mac & Fries Jobs Recovery” has done wonders for our recent college graduates. McDonalds is now requiring fry cooks to have college degrees. College graduates are finding tremendous opportunities at Taco Bells, KFCs, Pizza Huts, Burger Kings, Wendy’s and McDonalds across the land. At least their jobs can’t be outsourced to India. I think this development offers the University of Phoenix a tremendous new opportunity – a degree in “Do You Want Fries with That?” They can offer a Masters Degree in Advanced Fry Cooking. Maybe even a Doctorate in “Hold the Pickles, Hold the Lettuce”.

food services as proportion of the economy

Enslaving millions of young people in billions in un-payable debt to get degrees that obtain them jobs at fast food joints is going to backfire on the Feds when these young people get pissed off enough and when the taxpayers get a bill for hundreds of billions in bad debt that will be written off.

MSM JOINS THE PARTY & LIES ABOUT JOBS

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Posted on 5th April 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Marketwatch, owned by the Wall Street Journal – owned by Murdoch, didn’t take long to join the liefest about the horrific jobs report. They have a huge headline saying that the dreadful government spending cuts are causing businesses to cut payrolls. They print drivel from some Obama loving left wing excuse of an economist, working for a liberal think tank. It goes to show that the right wing and left wing are in total agreement regarding the size of government. The right wants their warfare expenditures and the left want their welfare expenditures. They want government to grow.

Does this chart reveal ANY government spending CUTS? ANY AT ALL?

Federal government spending in 2008 was $3 trillion. In 2004 it was $2.3 trillion. In 2000 it was $1.9 trillion.

The sequester “CUTS” are not cuts. They are a reduction in increases. The total for this year will be $40 billion. This amounts to 1.05% of the total government spending in FY13.

The clueless dupes, Keynesian fools, Obama lovers, and welfare/warfare statists will buy this load of crap from ideologues, even though anyone with even a basic amount of curiousity could prove the Chief Economist of the Center for American Progress to be a lying shill.

 

Jobs numbers show sharp cuts in hiring

Commentary: Government spending cuts already sapping recovery

By Heather Boushey


Shutterstock

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Sequester spring is not starting out well.

In a reversal of recent trends, today’s new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that employers have cut back sharply on hiring. Government cutbacks have already been slowing our nation’s economic growth and are now actively pulling employment downward, but the worst may be yet to come.

The sharp across-the-board cuts in government spending implemented March 1 are only beginning to show their ugly consequences. While it’s too early to know what the full impact will be on the unemployment rate, government spending cuts are already stealing wind from the sails of the recovery.

In March the U.S. economy only added 88,000 new jobs, but the unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 7.6%. The employment data for January and February were revised upward by a total of 61,000 jobs, and over the past three months, the economy has added an average of 168,000 jobs per month. At this rate, the United States will get back to full employment in 2020.

As jobs fail to appear fast enough to soak up all those who need a job, many people have given up searching for work. In March the labor force declined by about half a million people, and the labor force participation rate decreased by 0.2 percentage points to 63.3%. Adult men’s labor force participation (men ages 20 and over) was 72.7% in March, hitting the low of August 2012 and lower than any other month since 1948 at the end of World War II.

For those who continue looking for a job, the search remains an arduous process. Among those out of work and searching for a new job, 37.1% have been doing so for at least six months, and the typical unemployed worker takes 18.1 weeks to find a new job. When the unemployment rate was 4.6% in 2007, just before the start of the Great Recession, it took the typical unemployed worker only 8.5 weeks to find a new job.

Unemployment continues to be higher among those who are young, have less education, are veterans, or are non-white. In March the unemployment rate among teens was 24.2%, while it was 33.8% among African American teens and 28.1% among Hispanic teens.

Among those with only a high school diploma, the unemployment rate was 7.6%. African Americans and Hispanics had unemployment rates of 13.3% and 9.2%, respectively, while Iraq and Afghanistan veterans had an unemployment rate of 9.2%.

Housing hangover

The recovery in housing is also showing up in the labor market. Construction employment rose in March, adding 18,000 new jobs for a total of 162,000 over the past year. Alongside new homes, however, consumers should be out there buying new furniture, garden supplies, and appliances. But employment in retail sales is down in furniture (-1,800), building material and garden supply stores (-10,100), and electronics and appliances (-5,700).

One issue may be that too many new homes are actually being bought by investors and are not owner-occupied. Thus, even though housing is recovering, it isn’t (yet) leading the recovery in jobs as it has in so many prior recoveries.

Even though unemployment is stagnant, the low rate of inflation means that those with jobs are seeing a rise in their real take-home pay, although it’s a small one. Over the past three months, wages rose by an annualized quarterly rate of 2.3%, just above the rate of inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or CPI-U, which increased 2% over the past 12 months.

Based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, due to the combined effect of the payroll tax increase (800,000 fewer jobs in 2013) and sequestration (750,000 fewer jobs from March–December 2013), the U.S. economy will create 142,000 fewer jobs each month for the rest of the year. In January Congress allowed the payroll tax to revert to its usual level, eliminating the two-year tax holiday, and in March Congress allowed the so-called sequestration to occur, which will cost about 750,000 jobs over 10 months in 2013. Most of these jobs will be lost in the second and third quarters of this year, so we are only now beginning to see the effects. Without austerity, we might have seen a more robust number this month.

About five or six years ago, I had lunch with a good economist friend where we debated what the worst-case outcomes could be from the collapse of the housing bubble. My friend suggested that the worst that could happen would be an L-shaped recovery, one where employment didn’t grow enough to bring on full employment, but where employment grew just enough that policymakers could breathe a sigh of relief that things weren’t actually moving in the wrong direction. For years now, I have hoped that the lunchtime conversation wouldn’t be so prescient. With the sequester’s impacts yet to be felt, however, I wonder if we weren’t too optimistic.

Heather Boushey is chief economist at the Center for American Progress.

 
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