Tag: Economy

The “Real Stuff” Economy Is Falling Apart

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

Each month one or two high-profile government reports show the US is growing, adding jobs and generally recovering from the Great Recession. But it’s not clear how that can be, when the part of the economy that makes and moves real things keeps shrinking. Here’s a chart, published recently by Zero Hedge, showing that US manufacturing has been contracting for the past year:

 

 

Meanwhile, the companies that move physical things around are falling hard:

Continue reading “The “Real Stuff” Economy Is Falling Apart”

“Keep Reporting On Bright Economic Future” – China Ministry Of Truth Demands Media “Properly Interpret” Data

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/22/2015 22:32 -0400

The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. As China Digital Times reports, propaganda directives issued by the Xinhua News Agency and the Central Propaganda Department show that Chinese media are being instructed to “properly interpret economic data,” and “promote discourse on China’s bright economic future.”

As China Digital Time reports, two leaked images of propaganda directives issued by the Xinhua News Agency and the Central Propaganda Department show that Chinese media are being instructed to report positively on the economy. CDT has translated both.

The first below is the Xinhua notice, which asks its various departments to draft plans for “promoting the discourse on China’s bright economic future.”

screen_shot_2015-09-08_at_1.54.41_pm

Office of the Xinhua News Agency Editor-in-Chief

Notice

To the departments of Domestic News (Central Government Procurement Center), International News, Domestic News for Overseas Service, Photography, Reference News, and Audio-Video; the CNC [China Xinhua News Network Corporation], Xinhua Online, the New Media Center; all media reporting platforms; and the Editorial Department:

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Whither The Economy?

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

The great problem with corporate capitalism is that publicly owned companies have short time horizons. Unlike a privately owned business, the top executives of a publicly owned corporation generally come to their positions late in life. Consequently, they have a few years in which to make their fortune.

As a consequence of the short-sightedness of reformers and Congress, the annual salaries of top executives were capped at $1 million. Amounts in excess are not deductible for the company as an expense. The exception is “performance-related” pay, which has no limit. The result is that the major part of executive pay comes in the form of performance bonuses. Performance means a rise in the price of the company’s shares.

Performance bonuses can be honestly obtained by good management or mere luck that results in a rise in the company’s profits. However, there are a number of ways in which performance bonuses can be less legitimately obtained, almost all of which result in short-term gains to executives and shareholders and long-term damage to the corporation and economy.

Replacing American workers with foreign workers is one way. The collapse of communism in Russia and China and the collapse of socialism in India resulted in the under-utilized Indian and Chinese labor forces becoming available to American corporations. Pushed by “shareholder advocates,” Wall Street, and large retailers, US manufacturing corporations began closing their manufacturing plants in the US and producing offshore the goods, and later the services, that they market to Americans.

Continue reading “Whither The Economy?”

The Chinese Growth Engine is Sputtering

Guest Post by Jeff Desjardins

By the turn of the millennium, China was the sixth most productive nation in the world with a GDP comparable with France or Italy at US$1.2 trillion.

Economic growth didn’t stop there, and GDP increased ten-fold over the last fifteen years to surpass US$10 trillion. In “real” terms using PPP, China is now actually the largest economy in the world.

The rest of the world has benefited extensively from China’s coming out party. Cheap products flooded the shelves of the developed world, and China bought the world’s raw materials when no one else wanted them. Unfortunately, every good time must come to an end.

A Sputtering Chinese Economy

It hasn’t exactly been a secret that China’s economy has been slowing. The above radar graph from a research note by Credit Suisse shows that the economic news out of China has been tough to swallow as of late. Today, China rattled global markets even further by announcing a devaluation of the yuan by 1.9% to combat poor exports, which fell by 8.3% in July. This is the country’s largest currency devaluation since 1994.

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The US Economy Continues Its Collapse

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Do you remember when real reporters existed? Those were the days before the Clinton regime concentrated the media into a few hands and turned the media into a Ministry of Propaganda, a tool of Big Brother. The false reality in which Americans live extends into economic life. Last Friday’s employment report was a continuation of a long string of bad news spun into good news. The media repeats two numbers as if they mean something—the monthly payroll jobs gains and the unemployment rate—and ignores the numbers that show the continuing multi-year decline in employment opportunities while the economy is allegedly recovering.

The so-called recovery is based on the U.3 measure of the unemployment rate. This measure does not include any unemployed person who has become discouraged from the inability to find a job and has not looked for a job in four weeks. The U.3 measure of unemployment only includes the still hopeful who think they will find a job.

The government has a second official measure of unemployment, U.6. This measure, seldom reported, includes among the unemployed those who have been discouraged for less than one year. This official measure is double the 5.3% U.3 measure. What does it mean that the unemployment rate is over 10% after six years of alleged economic recovery?

In 1994 the Clinton regime stopped counting long-term discouraged workers as unemployed. Clinton wanted his economy to look better than Reagan’s, so he ceased counting the long-term discouraged workers that were part of Reagan’s unemployment rate. John Williams (shadowstats.com) continues to measure the long-term discouraged with the official methodology of that time, and when these unemployed are included, the US rate of unemployment as of July 2015 is 23%, several times higher than during the recession with which Fed chairman Paul Volcker greeted the Reagan presidency.

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Obamacare Architects At Harvard Furious After Learning They Are Not Exempt From Obamacare

My sides hurt from laughing so hard.

The money quote: ” what is really pissing Harvard off, is that as its perennial next door competitor MIT, as expressed by one professor Jonathan Gruber, made it quite clear that only a nation as stupid as America would allow such as an opaque law as Obamacare to be passed. “

Via ZeroHedge

The brain incubator at Harvard, the place which according to legend, and certainly the US News and World Report’s annual paid college infomercial, is the repository for some of the smartest people in the world, is furious.

The reason – Harvard’s illustrious faculty has learned that they too will be subject to their own policy recommendations as relates to Obamacare, which they themselves helped conceive. As the left-leaning NYT reported earlier today, “for years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.”

Because Harvard’s brilliant ivory tower economists and public policy wonks know precisely how to fix the world… as long as said fix never applies to them.

And sure enough, the faculty did everything in its power to make sure it never had to suffer the consequences of its own brilliance…

“Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that would require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay more for health care. The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed.“

… But it was too late:

The faculty vote came too late to stop the cost increases from taking effect this month, and the anger on campus remains focused on questions that are agitating many workplaces: How should the burden of health costs be shared by employers and employees? If employees have to bear more of the cost, will they skimp on medically necessary care, curtail the use of less valuable services, or both?

And it just gets better:

“Harvard is a microcosm of what’s happening in health care in the country,” said David M. Cutler, a health economist at the university who was an adviser to President Obama’s 2008 campaign. But only up to a point: Professors at Harvard have until now generally avoided the higher expenses that other employers have been passing on to employees. That makes the outrage among the faculty remarkable, Mr. Cutler said, because “Harvard was and remains a very generous employer.”

Ah, hypocrisy: exactly the same whether it is at the lowliest of community colleges or the leading bastion of liberal thought.

In Harvard’s health care enrollment guide for 2015, the university said it “must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven by health care reform,” otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act. The guide said that Harvard faced “added costs” because of provisions in the health care law that extend coverage for children up to age 26, offer free preventive services like mammograms and colonoscopies and, starting in 2018, add a tax on high-cost insurance, known as the Cadillac tax.

The faculty is enraged, ENRAGED that what it hoped would only apply to the plebian peasantry is just as applicable to the self-appointed smartest people in the world. Here’s Dick:

Richard F. Thomas, a Harvard professor of classics and one of the world’s leading authorities on Virgil, called the changes “deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”

And here’s Mary:

Mary D. Lewis, a professor who specializes in the history of modern France and has led opposition to the benefit changes, said they were tantamount to a pay cut. “Moreover,” she said, “this pay cut will be timed to come at precisely the moment when you are sick, stressed or facing the challenges of being a new parent.”

Why the anger? Because Harvard thought that it would be, drumroll, exempt from the Affordable Care Act which it was instrumental in conceiving :

The university is adopting standard features of most employer-sponsored health plans: Employees will now pay deductibles and a share of the costs, known as coinsurance, for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family. For a doctor’s office visit, the charge is $20. For most other services, patients will pay 10 percent of the cost until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family.
Continue reading the main story

 

Previously, Harvard employees paid a portion of insurance premiums and had low out-of-pocket costs when they received care.

Kinda like how America worked before the tax that is Obamacare was forcefully shoved down everyone’s throat thanks to Harvard brilliant geniuses no less who decided it was time to treat the free market like their own socialist lab experiment. But hey, at least it helped “boost” Q1 Q3 GDP by 1%.

It has gotten so bad that Harvard, realizing it is not exempt for socialist utopia, is suffering from “distress” and “anxiety.”

The president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, acknowledged in a letter to the faculty that the changes in health benefits — though based on recommendations from some of the university’s own health policy experts — were “causing distress” and had “generated anxiety” on campus. But she said the changes were necessary because Harvard’s health benefit costs were growing faster than operating revenues or staff salaries and were threatening the budget for other priorities like teaching, research and student aid.

 

In response, Harvard professors, including mathematicians and microeconomists, have dissected the university’s data and question whether its health costs have been growing as fast as the university says. Some created spreadsheets and contended that the university’s arguments about the growth of employee health costs were misleading. In recent years, national health spending has been growing at an exceptionally slow rate.

We also learn that the only reason why it was called “Affordable Care” is because, apparently, it was unaffordable.

some ideas that looked good to academia in theory are now causing consternation. In 2009, while Congress was considering the health care legislation, Dr. Alan M. Garber — then a Stanford professor and now the provost of Harvard — led a group of economists who sent an open letter to Mr. Obama endorsing cost-control features of the bill. They praised the Cadillac tax as a way to rein in health costs and premiums.

 

Dr. Garber, a physician and health economist, has been at the center of the current Harvard debate. He approved the changes in benefits, which were recommended by a committee that included university administrators and experts on health policy.

 

 

In an interview, Dr. Garber acknowledged that Harvard employees would face greater cost-sharing, but he defended the changes. “Cost-sharing, if done appropriately, can slow the growth of health spending,” he said. “We need to be prepared for the very real possibility that health expenditure growth will take off again.”

 

But Jerry R. Green, a professor of economics and a former provost who has been on the Harvard faculty for more than four decades, said the new out-of-pocket costs could lead people to defer medical care or diagnostic tests, causing more serious illnesses and costly complications in the future.

 

“It’s equivalent to taxing the sick,” Professor Green said. “I don’t think there’s any government in the world that would tax the sick.”

 

But in her view, there are drawbacks to the Harvard plan and others like it that require consumers to pay a share of health care costs at the time of service. “Consumer cost-sharing is a blunt instrument,” Professor Rosenthal said. “It will save money, but we have strong evidence that when faced with high out-of-pocket costs, consumers make choices that do not appear to be in their best interests in terms of health.”

If you aren’t crying with laughter yet, you will now once the sheer idiocy of central planning, even when conceived by the world’s smartest people, is unveiled:

Harvard’s new plan is far more generous than plans sold on public insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. Harvard says its plan pays 91 percent of the cost of care for a typical consumer, while the most popular plans on the exchanges, known as silver plans, pay 70 percent, on average.

 

In many states, consumers have complained about health plans that limit their choice of doctors and hospitals. Some Harvard employees have said they will gladly accept a narrower network of health care providers if it lowers their costs. But Harvard’s ability to create such networks is complicated by the fact that some of Boston’s best-known, most expensive hospitals are affiliated with Harvard Medical School. To create a network of high-value providers, Harvard would probably need to exclude some of its own teaching hospitals, or discourage their use.

 

“Harvard employees want access to everything,” said Dr. Barbara J. McNeil, the head of the health care policy department at Harvard Medical School and a member of the benefits committee. “They don’t want to be restricted in what institutions they can get care from.”

In other words, compared to the rest of the socialist experiment they helped conceive, Harvard has it much, much better. “Although out-of-pocket costs over all for a typical Harvard employee are to increase in 2015, administrators said premiums would decline slightly. They noted that the university, which has an endowment valued at more than $36 billion, had an unusual program to provide protection against high out-of-pocket costs for employees earning $95,000 a year or less. Still, professors said the protections did not offset the new financial burdens that would fall on junior faculty and lower-paid staff members.”

But the punchline comes from none other than a sociologist:

“It seems that Harvard is trying to save money by shifting costs to sick people,” said Mary C. Waters, a professor of sociology. “I don’t understand why a university with Harvard’s incredible resources would do this. What is the crisis?”

Indeed: how dare a university with such “incredible resources” be forced to comply with the policy it itself helped create?

Of course, none of the above is the issue at hand: what is really pissing Harvard off, is that as its perennial next door competitor MIT, as expressed by one professor Jonathan Gruber, made it quite clear that only a nation as stupid as America would allow such as an opaque law as Obamacare to be passed. And, by implication, Harvard being subject to this law, makes its faculty about as stupid as the average American voter. And there is nothing more crushing, “distressing” and “anxiety-provoking” for a bunch of wealthy, ivory tower dwellers than seeing their own egos go down in flames.

Or, said otherwise: MIT 1 – Harvard 0.


OBAMACARE IMPACT ON REAL PEOPLE

Remember Obama declaring to the entire country that the average American family would SAVE $2,500 per year if we passed Obamacare. Someone tell Nancy Pelosi that we finally did find out what was in the bill. The people in this video are real Americans working for a real small business. They aren’t wearing red pajamas and sipping a latte. They are bent over getting their $2,500 of “savings” from Obama.

Everyone now knows Obama lied. They know that his intentions were not to help the average American. His intention was to control the healthcare system and make us all serfs. And we let it happen. And we continue to sit still as we get a never ending rectal exam.

You now know why Obama’s State of the Union address had the lowest TV rating in history. You now know why Congress’ approval rating is lower than whale shit. You now know why retail sales are collapsing. You now know why this country is headed for disaster.

And remember, Obama delayed all of the really bad parts of Obamacare until after the upcoming mid-term elections. He is truly a lowlife, lying, corrupt, psychopathic, empty suit, representing the vested interests in this corporate fascist paradise.

 

EPIC FAIL – PART ONE

 “Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.” – Edmund Burke

No wonder one third of Americans are obese. The crap we are shoveling into our bodies is on par with the misinformation, propaganda and lies that are being programmed into our minds by government bureaucrats, corrupt politicians, corporate media gurus, and central banker puppets. Chief Clinton propaganda mouthpiece, James Carville, famously remarked during the 1992 presidential campaign that, “It’s the economy, stupid”. Clinton was able to successfully convince the American voters that George Bush’s handling of the economy caused the 1991 recession. In retrospect, it was revealed the economy had been recovering for months prior to the election. No one could ever accuse the American people of being perceptive, realistic or critical thinking when it comes to economics, math, history or distinguishing between truth or lies. Our government controlled public school system has successfully dumbed down the populace to a level where they enjoy their slavery and prefer conscious ignorance to critical thought.

The next six months leading up to the November elections will surely provide a shining example of the degraded society we’ve become. Both parties and their propaganda machines, SuperPacs, and corporate media sponsors will treat the igadget distracted masses to hundreds of hours of lies, spin, and vitriol, designed to divert the public from the fact that both parties act on behalf of the same masters and have no intention of changing course of the U.S. Titanic to avert the iceberg dead ahead. We will be treated to storylines about race, gun control, the war on women, energy independence, global warming, the war on terror, the imminent threat of Iran and North Korea, Obamacare, Romneycare, and of course the economy, stupid.

There are 240 million voting age Americans. About 130 million will likely vote in the 2012 election based upon recent voter participation results. This means that 110 million Americans don’t give a crap about who runs this country or they’ve come to their senses and realize our votes don’t matter. Between 1840 and 1900 voter participation ranged between 70% and 82% as Americans took their civic duty seriously and believed their vote counted. Since 1913, when the politicians relinquished control of our currency to a private bank controlled by a small group of powerful men, voter participation for President has ranged between 49% and 62%. It hasn’t surpassed 57% since 1968. Now that corporations are people and our candidates are selected by a few rich men, the transformation from a republic to a corporate fascist state is almost complete. During the coming interminable political campaign you will hear about jobs until your ears bleed. I can guarantee that 98% of the rhetoric will be false. Neither party wants the American people to understand the truth about what happened to our economy and jobs over the last 100 years. It has been a bipartisan screw job and ignoring the facts doesn’t change them.

The first fact that can’t be ignored is how many Americans are actually unemployed today. Here is some truth you won’t get from a politician or media talking head:

  • There are 243 million working age Americans.
  • There are 142 million employed Americans.
  • Only 101 million of the employed Americans are working more than 35 hours per week. This means that only 41.6% of all working age Americans have a full-time job.
  • According to the government drones at the BLS, 88 million Americans have “chosen” to not be in the labor force – the highest level in U.S. history.
  • The percentage of Americans in the workforce at 63.8% is the lowest since 1980 and down from a peak of 67.1% in 2000. The difference between these two percentages is 8 million Americans.
  • The BLS reports there are only 12.7 million unemployed Americans in the country, down from 15.3 million in 2009.
  • The BLS reports the unemployment rate has dropped from 10% in late 2009 to 8.3% today. Over this time frame the working age population grew by 5.7 million, while the number of employed Americans grew by 3.6 million. Only a government drone could interpret this data and report a dramatic decline in the unemployment rate.

 

Any critical thinking human being would examine the data being reported as fact by our government and regurgitated without question by the corporate mainstream media and conclude it is false, misleading and manipulated. The economy was booming in 2000 and 67.1% of the working age population were in the labor force. Today the economy is in much worse shape. More people NEED to work in order to just make ends meet, but according to the government, 8 million Americans have chosen to not work. Only an Ivy League economist or CNBC bimbo pundit would believe such a blatant distortion of reality. A comparison to prior decades provides all the evidence you need:

  • In 1980 the working age population was 168 million and the labor force totaled 107 million.
  • By 1990 the working age population grew by 21 million and the labor force grew by 19 million.
  • By 2000 the working age population grew by another 23 million and the labor force advanced by 17 million.
  • Since 2000 the working age population has grown by 30 million, but shockingly the labor force has supposedly grown by only 12 million.

 

This data is so twisted that there is absolutely no doubt the Federal Government is purposely manipulating the numbers to make the economic situation appear better than the reality. During the Great Depression propaganda and spin had not been perfected. There weren’t multiple definitions of unemployment designed to confuse and mislead the public. The peak level of unemployment in the 1930s was 25%. The current reported level is 8.3%. On a comparable basis to the 1930s, including short-term discouraged workers, those forced to work part-time, and the long-term discouraged workers which were defined out of existence in 1994 by the BLS, the real unemployment rate is 22% today. It feels like a depression for millions of Americans because it is a depression.

 

The rhetoric from the Obama administration about a jobs recovery is laughable. Full time employment peaked in July 2007 at 122.4 million. Today there are 113.9 million people classified as full-time, with only 101.3 million working more than 35 hours. There are 8.5 million fewer people with full time jobs today than there were in 2007. That fact is even more disheartening considering the working age population has grown by 10.5 million over the same time span. Taking an even longer term view provides the perspective needed to assess our true economic state.  Total nonfarm employment hasn’t grown in twelve years, while the working age population has grown by 30 million people.

 

Obama will tout the fact that we’ve added 3.6 million jobs since the bottom of this recession. What he won’t tout is that hiring of temporary workers surged by 37% and accounted for 25% of all the jobs added since 2009. I’m sure these temporary workers, with no health or retirement benefits, are confident about their future.  The facts about jobs and employment are consistent with the 47 million Americans on food stamps (up from 35 million when the recession supposedly ended). It’s a sure sign of recovery when spending on food stamps doubles in the last two years. No depression here, just move along.  

 

Record numbers of Americans being added to the SSDI rolls for depression and other illusory disabilities is surely a positive development pointing to a strong economic recovery. In just the first four months of this year, 539,000 joined the disability rolls and more than 725,000 put in applications. “We see a lot of people applying for disability once their unemployment insurance expires,” said Matthew Rutledge, a research economist at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research. The number of applications last year was up 24% compared with 2008, Social Security Administration data show. Why participate in the labor market when you can collect a government check for life because you are obese or depressed. These are the people no longer in the labor force. Once they go on SSDI, they rarely go back to work again.   

 

The government reported figure of 12.7 million unemployed Americans is an utter falsehood. There are in excess of 30 million Americans that are either unemployed or working part-time that want full-time jobs. Government propaganda doesn’t change the facts.

 “Facts don’t cease to exist because they are ignored.” – Aldous Huxley

Would You Like a Side Order of Facts with That Propaganda?

When you watch the Wall Street scam artists paraded on CNBC declaring the number of people not in the labor force is going up due to Baby Boomers retiring, you should understand they are propagating a falsehood. They are either intellectually dishonest or too lazy to do the most basic of research. They are paid millions to impart false storylines to anyone dumb enough to watch CNBC expecting facts or a smattering of truth. If you want some truth, turn to John Mauldin and John Hussman. CNBC doesn’t invite these outstanding honest analysts on their station when they can roll out a shill like Abbey Joseph Cohen or James Paulson. They wouldn’t want some factual analysis when they can have Becky Quick do one of her frequent handjob interviews with that doddering old status quo fool Warren Buffet.

A critical thinker might wonder how could real disposable income be dropping over the last three months and only have risen by 0.3% in the last year if we’ve had the strong job growth touted by Obama. Could it be the jobs being created are extraordinarily low-paying? There are signs of desperation everywhere you look. The two charts below, from one of John Mauldin’s recent articles, reveal the truth about the Baby Boomers retiring storyline. The first chart shows the employment level for those over the age of 55 since 2007. There were 25.3 million people over the age of 55 working in 2007 and there are 30.1 million working today. People over 55 have seen their total employment level rise by 4.8 million jobs since the beginning of the recession, and over 3 million jobs since the 3rd quarter of 2009. Total employment is down by 4 million since 2007, while employment among those over 55 is up 19%. John Hussman described the reality about employment in his recent weekly article:

“If you dig into the payroll data, the picture that emerges is breathtaking. Since the recession “ended” in June 2009, total non-farm payrolls in the U.S. have grown by 2.32 million jobs. However, if we look at workers 55 years of age and over, we find that employment in that group has increased by 3.04 million jobs. In contrast, employment among workers under age 55 has actually contracted by nearly one million jobs, regardless of which survey you use. Even over the past year, the vast majority of job creation has been in the 55-and-over group, while employment has been sluggish for all other workers, and has already turned down.”

I wonder how Larry Kudlow will spin this.

 

Now for the really eye opening facts. While the labor participation rate has been plunging, the Boomer participation rate has been skyrocketing. The participation rate for the over 65 age group is now at an all-time high. Do you think this has anything to do with home values dropping 36% since 2005, gasoline prices doubling since early 2009, food prices surging by 25%, the 1.4% annual return of stocks since 1999, or the .15% senior citizens can earn on their money today versus the 5% they could earn in 2007?

 

Intellectually dishonest ultra-liberal Ivy League defender of the Federal Reserve – Paul Krugman had this to say about Ben Bernanke’s zero interest rate policy on senior citizens:

“Finally, how is expansionary monetary policy supposed to hurt the 99 percent? Think of all the people living on fixed incomes, we’re told. But who are these people? I know the picture: retirees living on the interest on their bank account and their fixed pension check — and there are no doubt some people fitting that description. But there aren’t many of them.”

It must be comforting living in an ivory tower or penthouse suite and looking down upon the ignorant masses while caressing your Nobel Prize. The millions of senior citizens with $100,000 of savings could earn $5,000 of interest income in 2007 to supplement their $18,000 of Social Security income. Today, they can earn $150 while the Wall Street banks receive the benefits of ZIRP by borrowing for free from the Federal Reserve and earning billions risk free. Paulie doesn’t think the $4,850 reduction in income and the 15% increase in inflation since 2007 had a negative impact on senior citizens. They must be pouring into the work force because they are just bored, after working for the last 45 years. John Hussman has a slightly different viewpoint, based upon facts rather than a false disproven ideology:    

“Beginning first with Alan Greenspan, and then with Ben Bernanke, the Fed has increasingly pursued policies of suppressing interest rates, even driving real interest rates to negative levels after inflation. Combine this with the bursting of two Fed-enabled (if not Fed-induced) bubbles – one in stocks and one in housing, and the over-55 cohort has suffered an assault on its financial security: a difficult trifecta that includes the loss of interest income, the loss of portfolio value, and the loss of home equity. All of these have combined to provoke a delay in retirement plans and a need for these individuals to re-enter the labor force.

In short, what we’ve observed in the employment figures is not recovery, but desperation. Having starved savers of interest income, and having repeatedly subjected investors to Fed-induced financial bubbles that create volatility without durable returns, the Fed has successfully provoked job growth of the obligatory, low-wage variety. Over the past year, the majority of this growth has been in the 55-and-over cohort, while growth has turned down among other workers. Meanwhile, broad labor force participation continues to fall as discouraged workers leave the labor force entirely, which is the primary reason the unemployment rate has declined. All of this reflects not health, but despair, and helps to explain why real disposable income has grown by only 0.3% over the past year.”

Do you believe Krugman or Hussman? The key takeaway from the data is the desperation exhibited by average Americans, while the political governing elite and Wall Street pigs continue to gorge themselves at the trough of free money provided by the Federal Reserve, while paying themselves obscene bonuses for a job well done buying the corrupt Washington politicians.

 

Over the next six months we will hear unceasing rhetoric from Obama and Romney about how they are going to create jobs. Neither of these government apparatchiks have a clue about jobs or desire to change the course that was set one hundred years ago with the creation of the Federal Reserve. Obama never worked at a real job in his entire life, while Romney has spent his life firing people and spinning off heavily indebted companies to unsuspecting investors. The current deteriorating jobs picture has been decades in the making and a truly bipartisan effort. The rhetoric about America being an engine of growth and the world leader in innovation and entrepreneurship is laughable when examined with a critical eye. We are an aging empire living in the past as the facts portray an entirely different reality. Our fastest growing industries include:

  • Solar panel manufacturing (subsidized by your tax dollars)
  • For-profit universities (diploma mills subsidized by your tax dollars)
  • Pilates and yoga studios
  • Self-tanning product manufacturing
  • Social network game development
  • Hot sauce production

The “surge” in jobs in the last three months is being driven by these industries:

  • Food services and drinking places
  • Administrative and support services
  • Ambulatory health care services
  • Credit intermediation
  • Hospitals

Is this the picture of a world leading jobs machine or a delusional, paper pushing, self-involved, obese, sickly, overly indebted crumbling empire? The job openings in industries that actually produce something are barely identifiable on the chart below. Maybe the University of Phoenix can successfully retrain construction and manufacturing workers to be waiters, waitresses, and Wal-Mart greeters if the Federal government can funnel more of our tax dollars into student loans.    

 

If you thought low wage work was only for Chinese, Indians, and Vietnamese, you haven’t been paying attention. The United States is a world leader. We are by far the world leader among developed countries in percentage of low wage workers at 24.8%. I find it hysterical that the dysfunctional insolvent countries of Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy have a much smaller percentage of low wage workers than the great American empire. We have 142 million employed Americans and 35 million are slaving away in low paying thankless jobs. This explains why the half the workers in the country make less than $25,000 per year.  

 

The top three employment occupations in the country are:

  • Office and administrative support work
  • Sales & Related
  • Food preparation and serving related

 

There are high paying good jobs in America, but there aren’t many and on-line college graduates from the University of Phoenix aren’t going to get them. The highest paying jobs today require a high level of specialization and education, especially in the healthcare and technology industries. This disqualifies the vast majority of government run public school graduates. High paying manufacturing jobs which were the backbone of the country during the 1950s and 1960s are gone forever. The reasons for this transformation are multifaceted and will be addressed in Part Two of this article. It didn’t happen by accident and there are culprits to blame. The conversion of our country from making high quality things other countries needed to a debt driven service economy of paper pushers, hash slingers, and retail “specialists” has slowly but surely destroyed the middle class. The masses are distracted by the latest technological marvel that allows them to waste another two hours per day posting how they feel about the latest episode of America’s Got Something or America’s Top Whatever. We have become a country that glories in our materialism and shallow culture while acting like a thug around the world with our unparalleled military machine.  

This result is not an accident. It was set in motion by the actions of a handful of rapacious, wealthy powerful men that have been calling the shots in this country for the last hundred years. It wasn’t a planned conspiracy but the logical result of man-made inflation, a fiat currency not backed by gold, the craving of rich men to become richer, a willfully ignorant populace, and a slow devolution of our society into a corporate fascist state. We praise and honor psychopathic criminals while scorning and ridiculing the middle class workers that built this country. The American dream has become a nightmare for the millions of unemployed and underemployed. The acceleration of debt accumulation and money printing guarantees this rotting carcass of a country will go belly up in the foreseeable future.     

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.” – Kurt Vonnegut

In Part Two of this article I will examine how we got to this point and what is likely to happen next.