Employment & Economic Disparity Graphs

I saw a diary at DailyKos the other day that I wanted to spread to just a little wider audience.  Some are from the Economic Policy Institute and some are from other sources.  I will reprint one of the graphs – it’s one that I’ve seen monthly for the past 3 years and think it speaks volumes as to why the Occupy Movement remains viable and is growing.

Calculated Risk

As you can see, horrific job losses continue 4 years after the month of peak employment.  This is the longest such occurrence in modern history in the U.S.  If we extrapolate that trend, employment numbers last seen in 2007 will finally be achieved in 2015.  Meanwhile, population will increase and replacement jobs will continue to pay less than the originally held jobs.

At this point, it is worth pointing out that President Obama needs to start owning the economic conditions his policies have created.  He can’t keep pointing to Congress as if they’re exclusively the problem while he tries to play Mr. Nice Guy in Washington.  Americans don’t want Mr. Nice Guy and barely functional economic policies.  They want fully functional policies and politicians that can get them enacted.  Everything else is secondary.

In the larger scheme of things however, this graph shows one of the effects of Teabagger economic policy: longer and longer employment recoveries.  Make no mistake, this is exactly the type of situation that the 1% want to occur.  Will there be recoveries after the next couple of recessions?  I still think we’re witnessing a new normal condition of our economy.  How soon that theory is validated or refuted remains to be seen.

Republicans: No To Jobs, Yes To Wall St.

The Cons continue to stick it to the group that actually drives the U.S. economy: Americans.  Specifically, American workers.  The Cons are far more interested in showering Wall St. corporations with trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.  But when it comes time to keep a functioning jobs program going, it’s f-you.

Thanks to the Senate Cons, funding for a summer jobs program and enhanced support for poor families with children has been voted down.  The reason?  Supposedly the deficit.  But outside the D.C. bubble, we know the Cons don’t care about the deficit.  They loaded the deficit up with trillions of dollars when they had the White House and both houses of Congress last decade.  They never piped up about how bad deficits were for our future – until a Democrat was in the White House and Democrats controlled Congress.

We do not have a deficit crisis.

We have an unemployment crisis.

The deficit problem will not go away until we address our employment crisis.  If a little bit more spending is necessary to generate thousands of new jobs, as the jobs program the Cons just killed would have done, do you seriously think Americans would object to that?  The number one priority for Americans, regardless of party affiliation, is jobs.

So please, continue to prevent jobs from being created, Cons.  There are enough of us paying attention to point out you’re the ones preventing us, as usual, from moving forward.  Keep up your ridiculous antics.  Americans know you’re terrible at governing.  We’ll find out in November just how proud of your “No” label you are.

Thanks For The Awesome Job Market, Cons

Any Con worth their salt will tell you that the “free-market” will fix everything!  Their zeal to cram their fake religion down everybody’s throats led to the collapse of the U.S. economy in this first decade of the 21st century.  But there is a huge disconnect.  Thanks to both Cons and Democrats looking out for their Wall St. benefactors, most Americans haven’t and won’t feel anything close to a recovery for a long, long time.  While Wall St. has posted stunning gains since their lows earlier this year, millions more Americans have continued to lose their jobs and their livlihoods.

How bad have things gotten for the real average American?  How about a look at a paper published last month by Advance Realty and Rutgers: America’s New Post-Recession Employment Arithmetic.  Here are some choice figures for you to chew on [emphasis mine]:

• The combination of a weak economic expansion sandwiched between two recessions (2001, and 2007–2009) produced what will be a lost employment decade. As of August 2009, the nation had 1.3 million (1,256,000) fewer private sector jobs than in December 1999. This is the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s that America will have an absolute loss of jobs over the course of a decade.

• To put this new millennium experience into perspective, during the final two decades of the twentieth century, the nation gained a total of 35.5 million private-sector jobs. During the current decade, America appears destined to lose more than 1.7 million private-sector jobs.

• This 1.3 million annual increase in the labor force means that in terms of private-sector payroll employment, the nation has to create an estimated 920,000 jobs per year.  Adding this to the actual private-sector job losses accumulated during the 20 months (to date) of recession equates to an August 2009 employment deficit of 8.6 million jobs. Given conservative estimates of further employment declines (even if the recession ends in the third quarter of 2009) and the continued increase in the labor force, the nation’s employment deficit could approach 9.4 million private-sector jobs by December 2009.

• Erasing this deficit will require substantial and sustained employment growth. Even if the nation could add 2.15 million private-sector jobs per year starting in January 2010, it would need to maintain this pace for more than 7 straight years (7.63 years), or until August 2017, to eliminate the jobs deficit! This is approximately 50 percent greater than the length of the average post–World War II expansion (58 months).

The “free-market” cannot and never will fix this.  It’s going to take the concentrated effort of the federal government working with the private sector to pull us out of this disaster.  Thanks again, Cons!

[h/t MB]

Good & Bad Employment News

I’ll start with the bad news: a record number of Americans are drawing unemployment benefits.  4.8 million Americans are currently on the rolls.  With this month’s slew of announced layoffs, that number is sure to rise.  This is one of the results of Cons running the country for eight years.  The number of Americans getting unemployment insurance as a ratio of total Americans is the highest since 1983.  That number will likly get higher.  Weekly jobless claims are double what they were just one year ago.  As big as the Reinvestment Act is, is it big enough?  I don’t think so.

Now for the good employment news: President Obama has signed his first piece of legislation – the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.  The measure is designed to make it easier for workers to sue for decades-old discrimination. It nullifies one of 2008′s most shameful Supreme Court decisions that stated workers only had 180 days after the initial decision by employers to discriminate to file a pay-discrimination lawsuit.  It was one of many pro-corporate rulings the Supreme Court handed down last year – the very thing I and other progressives were trying to prevent by pressuring Senators to not allow Roberts and Alito to ascend to the court.  Their anti-worker, anti-citizen ruling history was well established.  Instead of localized effects, they now have the power to harm American workers for the next generation.  Thankfully, citizens do have some measure of recourse: electing pro-worker and pro-citizen legislators to establish moral laws protecting their interests.  While the LLFPA has been passed, which will help women achieve more pay equity in the future, Ledbetter will never see the money she was owed by Goodyear.

Jobless Claims Jumps; Unemployment Number Too Low

The largest number of jobs were lost since Dec. 1974 in Nov. 2008: 533,000.  The already announced September and October numbers were revised … downward.  403,000 jobs were lost in September (284,000 was the previous number) and 320,000 were lost in October (240,000 was the previous number).  Since the Bush/Con-servative recession began, over 1,900,000 jobs have disappeared.  Bush has set yet another milestone: the fewest number of jobs have been created during his presidency than at any time since the Great Depression.  Bush didn’t fail Con-servatism, as right-wing pundits would have us believe.  Bush executed Con-servative policies to the letter.  What’s happening today is, unfortunately, a predictable result of those policies.

The title menioned bad unemployment numbers.  I’ve written about this before and this month’s reported number provides a very good example of what I see wrong with it.  The article says that the unemployment rate catapulted from 6.5% to 6.7% from October to November.  Really?  The largest single month’s job loss in the past 35 years happened and the rate increased a whopping 0.2%?!  If that doesn’t make sense to you, there’s good reason.  And it’s why the rate doesn’t reflect the reality of the job market.  Reading a little further into the article,

The unemployment rate would have moved even higher if not for the exodus of 422,000 people from the work force. Economists thought many of those people probably abandoned their job searches out of sheer frustration. In November 2007, the jobless rate was at 4.7 percent.

So if folks aren’t actively looking for a job, they’re not counted as unemployed.  That makes absolutely no sense.  If they’re not employed, they’re unemployed … that’s what the word means.  The popularized “unemployment rate” is really a “job seeking rate” that is poorly surveyed.  Here’s what happened in the past: the unemployment rate used to count those who weren’t actively seeking work but also didn’t have a job.  As such, the reported rate was regularly higher.  That tended to have an effect on Americans’ psyche.  So in an effort to paint a pretty picture for everybody, the government changed the way the rate was calculated.

What does that mean from a policy standpoint?  It means that if you don’t think there’s a big problem, you’re not going to search for aggressive solutions to that problem.  You’re more likely to go with what Corporate America wants: leave them alone.  They’ve hired millions of overseas workers to fill jobs Americans used to have.  If Americans think the economy isn’t doing well or if they think too many of them are unemployed, or underemployed, they’re going to raise a stink.  Well, our elected officials, and the super-rich corporate interests that hold too much influence over them, can’t have that.  A frustrated populace tends to demand changes that Corporate America doesn’t want.  So things are sugarcoated.

I’ve read that if those not actively searching for jobs were counted, the unemployment rate would be quite a few percentage points higher.  If the underemployed (those working fewer hours than they want) were also counted, the unemployment rate would be more than double that which is popularly reported.  I recently found out that rate is calculated, but the corporate media doesn’t report it.  They’re only protecting us from ourselves, of course, by saying that it’s a complicated number and they’d have to spend time explaining it to Americans.  Thank goodness Americans have benefactors who can save us from our own stupidity.  Of course, it seems to me that the purpose of the press is to report the news, without alteration…

[Update 12/8/08]: I found the number I was looking for.  I also found numbers I wasn’t looking for, but are interesting nonetheless.  From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
U-1 Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force…2.6%
U-2 Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force…3.9%
U-3 Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate)…6.7%
U-4 Total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers…7.0%
U-5 Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other marginally attached workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers…7.8%
U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers…12.5%

So the U-3 number is the official unemployment rate.  The U-6 number includes the under-employed and is likely the more accurate number.  The U-3 number hasn’t been the historical number reported as the official unemployment numbers.  In the past, calculations were closer to the U-6 number.  In the latter part of the 20th century, additional measurements were created (that counted fewer and fewer people) and were reported as the official number.  The value of the official number hasn’t changed much sine that process began, giving the impression that unemployment was lower than it actually was (and is).  That puts artificial pressure on workers and unfairly manipulates the labor market.

In The News 10/27/08

Could waves (from storms or even tsunamis) pass by off-shore drilling platforms or even very small islands?  French and British physicists think so.  Their work needs to be taken from the lab to a more realistic situation before viability can be assessed.

Companies are going to make the recession deeper and longer.  They’re cutting wages and jobs as the economy continues to weaken.  It protects shareholders and executives, but prevents short- to medium-term economic growth.  You want consumption to pick back up?  It’s easy: increase wages.  When lower- and middle-class workers earn more, they buy more.  The past 8 years have clearly shown that when the upper-class makes more, they save more.  They don’t spend their money.  They don’t increase the size of business or create enough jobs.

The Bush doctrine is still in full effect.  U.S. commandos executed a strike into Syria over the weekend.  A couple of questions spring to mind.  First, don’t we have a Secretary of State?  Or is she too busy shopping for shoes to actually do her freaking job?  Second, do Americans realize that these kinds of actions solidify our wrecked image abroad?  The U.S. strikes with impunity into sovereign countries that it considers weak.  Actually, I think Americans do understand what’s going on: it’s one reason why Obama continues to lead McCain.  Unfortunately, this insane policy ensures that there will be future tension between the U.S. and interests in and around the Middle East. Anything to justify the War budget.

Corrupt Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens has been found guilty of lying about gifts he received and never reported.  An interesting facet of this case: if Stevens wins his re-election campaign this year, he can serve in Congress even though he is a convicted felon.  Why is that interesting?  Republicans have passed laws around the country denying convicted felons voting rights because they tend to vote Democratic.  The hypocrisy is disgusting, though unsurprising.  Stevens should be allowed to serve again once he pays his debt back to society, just like voters should be allowed to vote again once their debts have been repaid.  Stevens certainly shouldn’t be allowed to take part in any further Senate proceedings until his sentence has been served in full.  [Update]: Irony strikes in this case.  According to Alaska state law, Sen. Stevens can’t register to vote due to his felon status.  Which means he can’t vote for himself.  It’s only one felon, but it is interesting to see a Republican get caught up in conservative voter suppression strategies.