Pirate's Cove

Interesting list from Mortimer Zuckerman on just how bad Obama’s economy is doing. And, yes, it is now Obama’s economy. It’s his Generational Theft Act that is doing nothing except put the US deeper into debt and providing no stimulus to create jobs. It’s his global warming and healthcare legislation that makes companies hold off on hiring people because of the potential massive cost increases, and keeps people from starting their own businesses for the same reasons. It’s his economy that still hasn’t addressed the root cause of this recession, ie, the idiotic lending practices that Democrats put in place.

But, let’s hit up the 9 reasons, shall we?

1. June’s total included 185,000 people who were assumed to be at work, many of whom probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation: finance, for example. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, look to some of the 185,000 boosting the unemployment totals.
2. More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don’t count on the unemployment roll.
3. No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the past 12 months. They were not counted. Why? Because they hadn’t searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey. The assumption is that they had found work or don’t want it, but there are other explanations: school attendance, family responsibilities, sheer exhaustion.
4. The number of workers taking part-time jobs because of the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about 9 million, or 5.8 percent of the workforce. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job, and the total of unemployed and underemployed rises to 16.5 percent, putting the number of involuntarily idle workers in the range of an overwhelming 25 million.
5. The inside numbers are just as bad. The average workweek for production and nonsupervisory private-sector employees, around 80 percent of the workforce, dropped to 33 hours. That’s 48 minutes a week less than before the recession began, the lowest level of activity since the government began tracking such data 45 years ago. Full-time workers are being downgraded to part time as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water and factories operate at only 65 percent of capacity. If American workers were still putting in those extra 48 minutes a week now, 3.3 million fewer employees could perform the same aggregate amount of work. With a longer workweek, the unemployment rate would reach 11.7 percent, not the official 9.5 percent (which in turn dramatically exceeds the 8 percent rate projected by the Obama administration).
6. The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks. This is the longest term since the government started to track these data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (those out of a job for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high.
7. The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation running flat at $18.53 an hour.
8. The jobs report is even uglier when you consider that the sector producing goods is losing the most jobs–223,000 in the last report alone.
9. The prospects for job creation are equally distressing. The likelihood is that when economic activity picks up, employers will first choose to increase hours for existing workers and bring part-time workers to full-time status.

So, exactly what is the Obama administration doing? They say they are creating ditch digging projects, but, it sure seems that most of them are going to companies, and federal agencies, that are using existing employees, rather than hiring new ones.

The rest of the article is very interesting, so, I would highly recommend reading it. But, let me end with one thing. I went looking to see if this could be classified as a depression. No, it can’t. Interestingly, though, many sites discussing the Great Depression mention poor monetary policy from the government making the situation worse. In that case, Los Federales weren’t pumping money back into the economy. In this case, I would say that it is not the money being pumped in (though only about 6% of the stimulus money has been spent), it is where it is being pumped.