Of course, anyone with a lick of retail/restaurant experience knew this was coming-- it happens every year no matter who sits in the oval office.
Unemployment is up to 9.1% for the month of February. Since December, each month's number has climbed. The question now is, will it continue to climb? Let's hope not; things are tough enough as it is.
This is what get's me, and only proves to show how disconnected politicians are to the real national work picture. Few of these men and women seem to have ever worked a retail or restaurant job. If they had they'd know that hiring always picks up in the Fall, building up for the holiday shopping season. When shoppers stop shopping in January and February, all those extraneous workers to pay are shown the door; it's not fair, but that's the nature of business-- neither is it fair, however, for businesses to keep workers they don't need on the payroll.
Politicians either don't realize it, or don't care to point it out when they tout how well the jobs market is improving during the holiday season. For the sake of short-lived uptick in the polls politicians will gloss over this known-to-all-who-work-real-jobs fact. What they do realize is that people want to believe what their leaders are telling them; they want to believe unemployment is coming down. They want to believe the economy is improving.
If the unemployment rate continues to climb, and gas prices actually hit the five and six dollar mark analysts are touting for this summer, what does that say about president Obama's reelection chances?
Thursday, March 8, 2012
7 comments:
Your First Amendment right to free speech is a privilege and comes with a measure of responsibility. You have the right to exercise that responsibility here but we reserve the right to inform you when you've used that right irresponsibly.
We are benevolent dictators in this regard. Enjoy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
You might want to mention that your 9.1% figure is NOT the Bureau of Labor Statistics figure, but is produced by the Gallup polling agency which nobody reports and nobody particularly pays attention to.
ReplyDelete"At any rate, the February jobs report shows 227,000 new jobs, unemployment steady at 8.3% (many had expected the rate to tick up thanks to discouraged workers returning to the labor pool), workforce participation rates up slightly. Job gains were pretty general across the private sector economy, and for the first time in ages, government employment was steady rather than rapidly dropping. The December and January jobs numbers were revised upward as well, reinforcing the sense that a recovery could be under way."
ReplyDeleteWould you like some salt with your crow?
There's no crow, Ben. This is Gallup... recognized by both the right and left as a reputable firm. That their numbers differ from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' figure is analogous to the ACTUAL cost of government programs compared to the CBO's projected costs. If you ever put your trust solely in the government's word, on anything, you'll ALWAYS end up eating crow. Besides which, government and media cheat on their reporting of the numbers. Everyone knows this and they gloss right over it with a nudge and a wink.
ReplyDeleteFrom Forbes.com:
"In the latest, much celebrated, unemployment report, the labor force participation rate had plummeted to 63.7%, the most rapid decline in U.S. history. That means that under President Obama nearly 5 million Americans have fled the workforce in hopeless despair.
"The trick is that when those 5 million are not counted as in the work force, they are not counted as unemployed either. They may desperately need and want jobs. They may be in poverty, as many undoubtedly are, with America suffering today more people in poverty than in the entire half century the Census Bureau has been counting poverty. But they are not even counted in that 8.3% unemployment rate that Obama and his media cheerleaders were so tirelessly celebrating last week.
"If they were counted, the unemployment rate today would be a far more realistic 11%, better reflecting the suffering in the real economy under Obamanomics."
Any administration would do this (though only a democratic president would have the media whoring its integrity to support the lie). No president would want to tell the American people that unemployment is considerably higher than a little cooking of the numbers could ameliorate.
Thanks to Obama, I will never trust or take anything at face value any administration tries to sell me. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Thanks to Obama? So you trusted Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld?
ReplyDeleteMuch more than I trust Obama. In fact, I trusted Clinton more than I do Obama.
ReplyDeleteAnd look where that got you.
ReplyDeleteIt got me the exact place it got you... living in Obama's wanna-be banana republic.
ReplyDelete