Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

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When he was running for the presidency, one of Sen. Barack Obama campaign themes was the redistribution of wealth in the U.S. This is one campaign promise, at least, that he has kept as president.

An analysis of state data by USA TODAY reveals that one in six Americans now receive some form of government subsidy. More than 50 million are on Medicaid, an increase of 17% since December, 2007:

The program has grown even before the new health care law adds about 16 million people, beginning in 2014. That has strained doctors. “Private physicians are already indicating that they’re at their limit,” says Dan Hawkins of the National Association of Community Health Centers.

More than 40 million people get food stamps, an increase of nearly 50% during the economic downturn, according to government data through May. The program has grown steadily for three years.

Caseloads have risen as more people become eligible. The economic stimulus law signed by President Obama last year also boosted benefits.

“This program has proven to be incredibly responsive and effective,” says Ellin Vollinger of the Food Research and Action Center.

Close to 10 million receive unemployment insurance, nearly four times the number from 2007. Benefits have been extended by Congress eight times beyond the basic 26-week program, enabling the long-term unemployed to get up to 99 weeks of benefits. Caseloads peaked at nearly 12 million in January — “the highest numbers on record,” says Christine Riordan of the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for low-wage workers.

More than 4.4 million people are on welfare, an 18% increase during the recession. The program has grown slower than others, causing Brookings Institution expert Ron Haskins to question its effectiveness in the recession.

As caseloads for all the programs have soared, so have costs. The federal price tag for Medicaid has jumped 36% in two years, to $273 billion. Jobless benefits have soared from $43 billion to $160 billion. The food stamps program has risen 80%, to $70 billion. Welfare is up 24%, to $22 billion. Taken together, they cost more than Medicare.

The increases can be attributed to two factors: The recession has caused the number of those who qualify to under existing rules to grow, while government at all levels has expanded public assistance eligibility and benefits.

This is not sustainable. Entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare already have worker-to-beneficiary ratios which are too low for the programs to continue as we know them. With one of every six Americans depending on the taxpayers to support them, something’s got to give. Either taxes will be raised by substantial margins or benefits and eligibility will have to be curtailed. Or both. Neither remedy will be a popular one with the voters. This can has been kicked down the road for decades, but we’re getting very near the end of the road. there will be hell to pay. Welcome to the Democrat’s socialist welfare state.

- JP

President Obama’s Interior Department knew before he imposed it that his six-month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico would cost more than 23,000 Americans their jobs and cause severe economic damage throughout Louisiana and the Gulf states. But that didn’t even slow down the radical administration. It defied a federal judge and went ahead with it anyway:

Federal court documents examined by The Wall Street Journal reveal a July 10 memo to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar from Michael Bromwich in which he estimated that “a six-month deepwater-drilling halt would result in ‘lost direct employment’ affecting approximately 9,450 workers and ‘lost jobs from indirect and induced effects’ affecting about 13,797 more.’”

The Journal also reports that Bromwich said it would be better to implement a revised regulatory process, but concluded, “I guess the moratoria approach is necessary because the MMS cannot be trusted to regulate.” That’s the Interior agency formerly known as the Minerals and Mining Service, which oversaw federal regulation of drilling rigs in the Gulf.

The first Obama drilling ban was thrown out by U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman, who said the measure was being imposed “arbitrarily” and without regard for the “irreparable harm to businesses” it would cause. The administration changed some wording here and there and went ahead with the six-month ban.

Although it was supposedly intended only to temporarily suspend deepwater drilling operations in the Gulf, critics say it has also forced a slowdown or halt of drilling operations in shallow water and onland in some Western states.

An energy industry group, The American Energy Alliance, references a study by two LSU professors who put the economic losses from the ban at $2.7 billion nationwide. The full WSJ report is here. Ed Morrissey opines on the long-term fallout from Obama’s drilling ban:

Rather than fix their own problems (which, to be fair, predated this administration as well as continued under Obama and Salazar), Obama and his team instead imposed the ban, killing thousands of jobs and setting back the economy of the Gulf by years — literally. The capital equipment needed to produce oil in the Gulf has begun to disperse to foreign waters, thanks to the government’s refusal to allow continued drilling by companies that had nothing to do with Deepwater Horizon. Any new drilling will take years to restart if those rigs float away to other resources, and the capital investment that created today’s rigs may not be as easy to acquire in the wake of the arbitrary nature of Obama’s actions.

That’s one of the reasons why we’re already having trouble producing jobs. This is just a microcosm of Obamanomics.

Actions have consequences. So do elections.

- JP

Bad news on the employment front, as applications for unemployment insurance rose to the highest point since November. It appears that employers are laying off workers again (as if they ever stopped):

Initial claims for jobless benefits rose by 12,000 last week to 500,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. It was the fourth increase in the past five weeks and evidence that the economic recovery has weakened.

Homebuilders and other construction firms are laying off more workers as the housing sector slumps after the expiration of a popular homebuyers’ tax credit. State and local governments are also cutting jobs to close large budget gaps.

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The increase suggests the economy is creating even fewer jobs than in the first half of this year, when private employers added an average of about 100,000 jobs per month. That’s barely enough to keep the unemployment rate from rising. The jobless rate has been stuck at 9.5 percent for two months.

Stock futures fell on the prospects of more layoffs. Dow Jones industrial average futures had risen by 50 points before the report was released. They dropped immediately afterward and were down six points shortly before the market opened.

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The number of people continuing to receive benefits fell by 13,000 to 4.5 million, the department said. The continuing claims data lags initial claims by one week.

But that doesn’t include millions of people receiving extended unemployment insurance, paid for by the federal government. About 5.6 million unemployed workers were on the extended unemployment benefit rolls, as of the week ending July 31, the latest data available. That’s an increase of about 300,000 from the previous week.

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After growing at a 3.7 percent annual rate in the first quarter, the economy’s growth slowed to 2.4 percent in the April-to-June period. Some economists forecast it will drop to as low as 1.5 percent in the second half of this year.

The political fallout from the jobless numbers could be extremely radioactive for Congressional Democrats, as they come less than 90 days before the November elections. Jobs and the economy continue to be the number one concern on the minds of voters. But Congress and the Obama Administration’s action taken in the name of saving or creating jobs have been a failure. Even worse, there is a growing perception among voters that President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and majority Leader Reid have been more focused on pursuing a left wing political agenda than doing what the voters hired them to do.that’s why some analysts are predicting that the Democrats are increasingly in danger of losing control of both houses of Congress in the fall.

- JP

In yet another grim harbinger of the 2010 midterm elections for the party in power, a majority of American voters say the congressional agenda being pushed by the Democrats is extreme, while a plurality describe the GOP agenda as mainstream:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 57% of Likely U.S. Voters think the agenda of Democrats in Congress is extreme. Thirty-four percent (34%) say it is more accurate to describe the Democratic agenda as mainstream.

Voters are more narrowly divided when it comes to the agenda of congressional Republicans. Forty-five percent (45%) of voters view the GOP agenda as mainstream, but nearly as many (40%) say it’s more accurate to call it extreme. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided.

The Political Class, however, has dramatically different views of the agendas of the two parties from what Mainstream voters think. Ninety-one percent (91%) of the Political Class say the Democratic agenda in Congress is in the mainstream, but 70% of Mainstream voters see that agenda as extreme.

While 53% of Mainstream voters see the Republican congressional agenda as in the mainstream, 81% of Political Class voters regard it as extreme.

Data released earlier showed that 67% of the Political Class believes the country is heading in the right direction. Among Mainstream voters, 84% say the nation has gotten off on the wrong track.

As most members of Congress head home to make the case for their reelection, only 16% of voters rate the overall performance of Congress as good or excellent. Most voters (56%) still give Congress poor marks for how it’s doing its job.

The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on August 9-10, 2010 for Rasmussen Reports. The poll’s margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points, at the 95% confidence level. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. A description of the survey’s methodology can be found here.

- JP

The U.S. House has approved President Obama’s $26 billion government employee union bailout bill by a vote of 247 to 161:

Billions will now go disproportionately to bloated and mismanaged school districts. Supposedly, this was to prevent layoffs of teachers, but most school systems receiving the money weren’t planning to lay off any teachers. Texas may be barred from receiving any money under the bailout due to its past thrift–it refused to spend beyond its means last year, and thus is deemed less needy.

This bailout will enable state governments to keep irresponsibly increasing their employees’ pay faster than inflation, even though their pay is already much higher than in the private sector.

This bill was a high priority of government employee unions. Obama has not hidden his pro-union bias. As he noted in a 2006 book, “I owe those unions. . .When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away. I don’t mind feeling obligated.”

Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package was deliberately crafted to focus on propping up government employment (especially in welfare and social service agencies) at the expense of private-sector blue-collar jobs, where unemployment is concentrated. The stimulus package is using taxpayer subsidies to replace U.S. jobs with foreign green jobs. It also destroyed jobs in America’s export sector.

While salaries and benefits for government employees have been on the rise, we have seen the opposite trend in the private sector:

Well, let’s just say that government work was a growth industry in the Obama administration. In fact, only three metropolitan areas of more than 1 million people saw an increase in personal income in 2009. Want to guess what one of them was?

Among the 52 MSAs with a population of one million or more, only three had an increase in both net earnings and personal income in 2009 (Washington, D.C.; San Antonio, Texas; and Virginia Beach, Virginia). The biggest gains in compensation in these three MSAs were in the federal government (civilian and military combined). Private sector compensation declined in these three MSAs.

As for the rest of the nation …

Personal income declined in 2009 in most of the nation’s metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), according to estimates released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal income declined in 223 MSAs, increased in 134, and remained unchanged in 9 MSAs. On average, MSA personal income fell 1.8 percent in 2009, after rising 2.7 percent in 2008.

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24/7 Wall Street concludes:

The average citizen is likely to look at these Commerce Department numbers and wonder where his tax payments are going. It would appear that some of that money has gone to increase the pay of the government’s workforce during what is supposed to be a period of federal austerity. The opposite is true. Perhaps it requires more, better-paid people to run all the government’s stimulus packages.

Small wonder Joe Biden and Barack Obama keep talking about “Recovery Summer.” In Washington DC, boom times have arrived. In that Beltway bubble, floated by taxpayer dollars from everywhere else that income is falling, the economy looks pretty darned tasty — as long as the electorate doesn’t send a new Congress to Capitol Hill to stop the gravy train.

Oh, by all means, let’s derail that runaway locomotive.

- JP

As more temporary census jobs ended, employment fell for a second straight month in July while private hiring rose “less than expected.” Reuters reported that this indicates “an anemic economic recovery”:

Non-farm payrolls fell 131,000, the Labor Department said on Friday as temporary jobs to conduct the decennial census dropped by 143,000. Private employment, considered a better gauge of labor market health, rose 71,000 after increasing 31,000 in June.

In addition, the government revised payrolls for May and June to show 97,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.

Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast overall employment falling 65,000 and private-sector hiring increasing 90,000.

“We’re seeing an economy that’s moving ahead slowly but not creating net on balance a lot of new jobs, and it points to continued expectations the economic slowdown we’ve seen will probably extend another two to three months, if not longer,” said Fred Dickson, chief market strategist at The Davidson Cos. in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

Economic recovery? What economic recovery?

The bad jobs news sent stocks sinking:

The highly-anticipated jobs report sent Dow Jones Industrial Average futures down 55 points to 10580, Standard & Poor’s 500-share futures down 7 points to 1116 and Nasdaq 100 futures down 11 points to 1891. Prior to the data, Dow Jones Industrial Average futures had been up 15 points, S&P 500 futures edged up 2 and Nasdaq futures rose 3. Changes in stock futures do not always accurately predict early stock moves after the open.

Nonfarm payrolls fell by 131,000 last month as the rise in private-sector employment was not enough to make up for the government jobs lost, the U.S. Labor Department said Friday. Only 71,000 private-sector jobs were added last month while 143,000 temporary workers on the 2010 census were let go. Economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires were expecting total nonfarm payrolls to drop by a smaller 60,000 in July.

In the wake of the Christmas Day bombing, the Obama White House dispatched Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano out to the networks to insist that “the system worked,” a claim that got roundly ridiculed and gave the administration a public-relations bloody nose. They apparently have learned little in the nine months since, as Obama sends Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to CNBC to insist that we’re having the best recovery in a generation… No, really…

The jobless rate, which is calculated using a separate household survey, held steady at 9.5% in July. Economists were expecting it to edge higher to 9.6%.

Despite the Obama Administration’s efforts to put a positive spin on the latest news, the U.S. economy is hurting for jobs, and so is an angry electorate just 90 days away from the midterm elections:

The employment-population ratio remained at 58.4%, which means we’re still skipping along the bottom end of a generational dive. Discouraged workers remained at 1.2 million for the second straight month. The minimal job creation hasn’t moved people back into the workforce, and the population is still outgrowing the jobs.

This isn’t a Recovery Summer. It’s a slow slide, certainly better than the rapid disintegration of 2009, but we haven’t replaced those jobs yet, either. Job losses are cumulative. In a normal recovery with proper economic policies of lower barriers to investor entry, we would see a rapid replacement of jobs in this time frame that would take us back to somewhere around 80% of what was lost, with the remaining 20% being the most difficult to recover. We have not yet even begun that ascent. I’ll update this with a couple of slides later this morning to demonstrate the problem.

Expect the White House to hail the best private-sector job creation numbers since March, but economists won’t get fooled. We’re still descending, and will until we get job creation solidly above 100,000 new additions per month.

- JP